Everyone has read Lord of the Rings. Most people have read The Hobbit. Quite a few got through The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales unscathed. But how many have read Mr Bliss?

I got a facsimile edition of it for Christmas a few years back, and it is lovely. It reproduces a manuscript illustrated by the author.

The book itself is on the Children's Book end of the spectrum, and does not really delve deeply into the forces of good and evil. But it does contain a man with appropriate appreciation for tall headgear, a Girabbit (a cross between a Giraffe and a Rabbit, which should put Richard Dawkins into an early grave if he ever heard of it), a red-wheeled motorcar (which makes me rethink my abhorrence of that type of machinery), a Mr Day, a Mrs Knight, a poor donkey with a difficult life, and an Adventure of sorts involving sometimes luminescent bears.


Since you haven't already stormed out to purchase the item (as you are clearly still reading this), I expect you want more information. Writing style, perhaps? It is a little like a nonsensical, surrealism-tinged Wodehouse. I strongly suspect children's toys were part of the inspiration. Children's toys alone cannot account for it all, though. Like when Mr Bliss says "I am blessed and bothered ... if it isn't the Girabbit's head sticking out of my chimney; and he seems to be munching a carpet". I suspect it takes a very special sort of brain to make that happen.

To conclude: I really want a Girabbit.