The chance discovery of a photograph of Professor Brian Thrupiece sitting comfortably in a distinctly American garden chair has given a surprise boost to online sales of the chair some 50 years after the image was captured.
In a story worthy of anything to be found in an average month's Dorset Extraordinary Garden Chair Stories Monthly, the photograph was discovered by members of the TOAST party during their sojourn in New England following their (allegedly) highly successful attempt to conjure the spirit of Professor Thrupiece in Bryant Park, New York last Friday.
Contained in the small uncatalogued Thrupiece archive held in the Trumbull Municipal Library, Connecticut - the items in the collection were accidentally left by Professor Thrupiece on a desk in the library in April 1969 and never collected - the photograph has gone unremarked until now*. [For obvious reasons it escaped the attention of the editors of the published Complete Catalogue of Thrupiece Photographs compiled in 2015 on the 10th anniversary of his disappearance from a hotel room in Switzerland following an incident with a small electrical appliance widely believed to be Chinese-sourced nasal clippers.]
[*The complete Trumbull collection otherwise includes: 1 biro [black], 1 train ticket [Metro-North New York-Fairfield, Ct dated 13 April 1969], 1 paper handkerchief [not pristine], 1 photograph, 1 postcard [partially written but unaddressed], 2 mintos, 1 scrap of paper bearing a series of numerals which might be a telephone number, 1 small and almost empty bottle labelled "Clipper Oil, Not to Be Taken Internally" .]
TOAST member Carole-Anne Farnsley-Barnsley was excited to discover the photograph when she visited the library in search of a rest room. "I was excited to discover the photograph when I visited the library in search of a rest room", she confirmed. "I had intended to use the restroom in the nearby supermarket but found myself facing a picket-line of workers angry at the supermarket's withdrawal of free Twinkies during coffee breaks. Declining to cross the line I was advised that I could "pee in the library". It was then that I saw the photograph in a glass exhibition cabinet labelled "Unknown man in Adirondack Chair". Of course I knew immediately that it was him."
Though some mystery still surrounds the image - where, when and why it was taken as well as why it was in the Professor's possession during his visit to Trumbull - the worldwide manufacturers of the Professor Thrupiece Adirondack Chair [The Threadbone Furniture Company Inc] are more interested in the sudden surge in sales which have resulted from its discovery. Since news broke of the Professor's personal endorsement, sales have more than doubled to 3. "It's great news for our company", said a smiling Head of Wooden Furniture Marketing Tim Ber, "the Professor's association with the chair could do for the Adirondack, what Val Doonican did for the rocking chair - ie popularise it with incontinent tone-deaf geriatrics Dorset-wide".
Meanwhile, Thrupiece Adirondack Chair enthusiast Graeme Garden-Seating has penned the following lines in celebration of recent events:
Ode to a [Green] Thrupiece Adirondack Chair:
Where'ere I rest my buttocks
Where'ere I place my limbs
Of seizing cramps and numbness
My tiring frame begins
To protest - full and strong.
‘Tis then I come to realise
The chair itself is wrong.
And so to Threadbonemeals
In haste but purpose bent
I ask what chair befits me
What has the good Lord sent
To ease my aching back.
The weird [but surprisingly knowledeable] non-binary salesperson recommends:
The Thrupiece Adirondack
Oh most sublime of structures
Oh rarest of all frames
Behold my Adirondack
Consign the rest to flames !
Relaxed, full-sleeped
Prostrate, inert
To rest perchance to snore.
THE END
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