Dr Clock is an unusual collection of (mostly excerpted) fiction, poems, essays, humourous pieces and--naturally, since it's a book from Redstone--many illustrations. The prose selections, most of them only a page or two, have been chosen for their absurdity, in a very broad sense of the word, and the art ranges from the absurd to the incongruous to the camp: Ruscha and Saul Steinberg are included but so too are a quite odd Mexican wall chart, photos from old knitting magazines, and a garish poster for a remake of Tarzan. The writing is light in tone, but the writers of it are anything but lightweight: Perec, Ballard, Borges, Kharms, and Joseph Roth are here. Pieces from authors like Robert Filliou and Donald Parsnips are a bonus, as their works in long-out-of-print small press editions are now priced to appeal only to avid book collectors with carefree spending habits.

You needn't have heard of the writers or artists I've mentioned to enjoy this book hugely; you could in fact regard it as light reading to be kept at the bedside. For me it is despite its bitsiness a fair bit more than that: it's exercised my imagination, it's introduced me to writers and artists I mightn't otherwise have been likely to know about, and it's a book I shall re-read or simply leaf through in years to come, just as I've done in the years since buying it.

And it's the only book I'm likely ever to have that contains an errata slip referring to bacon and eggs and Einstein.