Though relatively commonplace - such was the level of his industry in all he undertook - new Thrupiece "discoveries" are always treated by the scholarly community with appropriate scepticism until their authenticity is fully proven and accepted. As his post-disappearance (we hesitate even now to say post-mortem) reputation continues to grow, Thrupiece manuscripts command significant prices at auction - significant enough, that is, for it to be worth the trouble of the forger's art. As Sothebones manuscript expert Fred Folio once remarked, "printing Thrupiece manuscripts is like printing money only easier and cheaper - they tend to be typescripts on low grade paper and are rarely in colour. Anyone with a Lexmark T400C can do it by following the online instructions".
Fortunately for the expert, however, the Professor's distinctive style - the rhythm of his prose, the cadence of his sentences, the fearless "no-nonsense" intolerance of the fashionably easy statement and the unconventional spellnig (sic) of his texts - generally makes separating the genuine from the fake relatively straightforward and this has proven the case once again as Threadbone Laboratory technicians in conjunction with Sothebones experts have given the thumbs up to a three page fragment which recently came into the posession of Threadbone, Threadbone and Threadbone partner Joshua Threadbone-McNightly.
The manuscript arrived at the at the firm's offices in Great Heaving in a plain brown envelope with a Burton Bradstock postmark. Mr Threadbone-McNightly explains: "At first we thought it might be a bomb - we have received a number of threats recently in connection with a Soviet portrait "issue" - and we were, naturally suspicious. However it was too thin to be an explosive device and there were no wires and no detectable ticking sounds. We concluded it was either a letter or a manuscript and we were not wrong. To be on the safe side, however, we asked an office junior to open it in a sealed room and once it was clear nothing had "gone off" and she was more or less in one piece, we examined it more closely. We were delighted to discover it was a hitherto unknown Thrupiece manuscript, or rather, a hitherto unknown Thrupiece manuscript fragment - possibly an early draft of a paper or an unfinished piece - dating from 2004/5 and clearly in the Professor's style."
In the piece we find the Professor reflecting in relative tranquility on the state of Culinary Bio-ethical writing. "It is a considered but quite savage piece", Italian Thrupiece expert Italo Calvini-Contrabasso says, "which shows that as he aged his position did not soften. He was always the enemy of wooly-thinking and a staunch defender of the hypothetico-deductive model of logical positivist science allied to a quasi-Marxist stance in the case of offal-centred dialectics." Asked if the manuscript's incompleteness was a loss to science, Dr Calvini-Contabasso thought not: "it's pretty obvious from what's there where this was going and it might have gone there at some length."
Readers with a high enough IQ and an interest in post-colonial neo-relativism can see the full piece HERE
LEFT: Professor Thrupiece's Desk: A romanticised and wholly unrealistic approximation created for the cover of Thrupiece by Amanda J Threadbone - part of The Illustrated Lives of the Great Thinkers Series from The Threadbone Press - was published in 2009. The present fragment was more likely written on a formica/laminate composite desk in the Professor's Geneva Office. RIGHT: The first page of the newly discovered manuscript which is creating great excitement in the scholarly community. Pages 2 & 3 not so much.
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