Fed by Birds

If there's one thing the readers of this blog like, it's moss.

So this 1950 King Penguin book by Professor P.W. Richards might be of interest. Professor Richards complains that moss is unjustly neglected, quoting botanist John Bartram: "Before Dr Dillenius gave me a hint of it, I took no particular notice of mosses, but looked upon them as a cow looks at a pair of new barn doors."

Richards is forced to admit, 'As far as direct economic value is concerned, mosses are not of great importance.' Although in former days, he points out, they were used for stuffing mattresses and pillows in rustic areas, or to make baskets and antiseptic bandages.

He gives some tips on how to cultivate moss - water with rainwater, and avoid lime: "With these hints and a little preliminary experience, anyone should be able to embark on a successful career as a moss gardener."

The beautiful illustrations are by Johannes Hedwig from his 1787 book on mosses studied through a microscope.

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Of all the many versions of Alice in Wonderland at the Rare Book Room, I think I like this sweet 1929 one, with illustrations by Hungarian Willy Pogány (who it seems worked on everything from Djer-Kiss perfume adverts to the set design for Boris Karloff's The Mummy).

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What could be more exciting than the opening titles of old films - as you look at this collection of page after page of movie title stills, you expect to hear the tooting of a fanfare or banging of a gong as the matinee begins. I haven't seen some of these films but Le Salaire de la Peur or The Wages of Fear is a winner: sweaty truckers on an urgent mission drive a load of nitroglycerine veeeery carefully...

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If you're stuck at work this summer with no relief in sight, why not take a one-minute vacation, courtesy of the Quiet American? Listen to a parrot sing in Cohasset, Massachusetts, the ice breaking on Lake Superior, a steam train travelling through the Australian bush, or, my favourite, chomping cows in the Bavarian Alps.

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A recent Radio 4 programme about MI6 first alerted me to the links between espionage and knitting. It described old French ladies keeping count of Nazi trains with their clandestine knitting code - purl one for a goods train, drop one for a military train and so on.

It turns out there are more connections between these two activities than you'd think. For instance, "red spy queen" Elizabeth Bentley hid secret documents in her knitting bag.

A woman called Old Mom Rinker spied for George Washington by knitting near the enemy camp, putting her overheard information on scraps of paper inside balls of yarn and nudging them off the cliff to soldiers below.

And cold war spy George Blake used a knitting needle ladder to escape from Wormwood Scrubs.

These investigations led me to an even stranger phenomenon - the shepherds of Landes in Aquitaine, who liked to knit on stilts:

Pattern for a Morse Code vest

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