Knock Three Times

Knock Three Times is not a well-known book, which is a pity.

Published
Categorised as Books

Here I am

Also I haven’t been updat­ing this blog as much lately, because I’ve just been so busy. I went to Croa­tia, Slov­e­nia and Austria for work and pleas­ure in June, and then came to Cambridge at the start of the month to teach on a resid­en­tial course. My contrac­ted hours were already high, and I’ve been doing a lot of over­time cover­ing for someone who was hospit­al­ised. I’ve worked 160 hours in the last three weeks, so it’s no surprise I’ve had no spare time. I only have one more week left to go however, so expect some photos of Austria and the former Yugoslavia, as well as other things.

Profess­or Knatsch­ke

My univer­sity library had a massive stack of print­ing industry annu­als from the 1890s through to the 20s. I always enjoyed look­ing through them because the illus­tra­tions and articles they chose to show­case new print­ing tech­no­lo­gies were often really odd, and were good to photo­copy for collages and zines. Next to them on the shelf was a strange little book called Profess­or Knatsch­ke. It’s a comedy book writ­ten and illus­trated in 1912 by Alsa­tian satir­ist Jean-Jacques Waltz, aka Hansi, about a clue­less German profess­or and his daughter’s trip to Paris, mock­ing both the French and the Germans (but mostly the Germans) in a more inno­cent pre-WW1 pre-Nazi era. I always really liked the illus­tra­tions (and Elsa K’s obses­sion with making gifts embroidered with “inspir­ing” mottoes) , and now it’s avail­able free online as a copy­right-free ebook.

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