Rare books and the chambermaid gag

A year ago, or less, I praised a book by the French writer Raymond Queneau called We Always Treat Women Too Well, which, unlikely as it sounds, is a surrealist sex romp set in the Dublin Post Office during the Easter Rising of blessed memory. I thought I might receive furious protests from Irish patriots, but there was absolutely no reaction to the piece at all - indeed, I had forgotten all about writing it until I had a letter the other day from a reader who said he had finally come across a copy, read it and found it disgracefully hilarious, so thanks for putting him on to it.

I think that's wonderful. In these days of information technology, the Internet and all the rest of it, we are constantly being given the impression that everything is online, available and just around the corner. This is so clearly a load of baloney that I hardly dare mention it, but people do seem to believe it. I'll give you an example of how unavailable things can get, just out of sheer generosity. Recently on Radio 4, they dramatised a book called In the Red, which was a very funny comedy thriller about bank managers being murdered. In the Radio Times it said, "from the novel by Mark Tavener...", so I activated my local friendly bookshop and waited for it to arrive.

It never did. Instead, my local friendly bookshop rang up and said there was no record of such a book being in print. So, activated by unusual energy, I wrote to the producer of the BBC programme and asked him what this was all about. He kindly wrote back and said that the book had in fact been published by Hutchinson in 1990 and had done quite well in some literary prize or other (runner-up in the PG Wodehouse Prize or something similar) but had been allowed to go out of print.

This explains why, when In the Red was repeated on Radio 4 recently, the Radio Times billed it no longer as "from the novel by ..." but "from the black comedy by ...". Mark you, it doesn't explain why Hutchinson let it go out of print, but I'm sure there was a perfectly bad reason for that.

It's amazing, the way that things get away. I was recently talking to the still spry HF Ellis (erstwhile Punch writer and author of the very funny books about A J Wentworth BA, the hapless assistant prep schoolmaster) and I happened to mention Alex Atkinson, who wrote for Punch in the Fifties and collaborated on several travel books with Ronald Searle.

"I always loved their By Rocking Chair Across America," I said. "It has the best opening of any travel book I ever read. Too many books about the United States are written by men who have spent only a few weeks in the country. This one is different; it is by a man who has never been there in his life."

"Did you ever read Alex's crime novel?" asked Ellis, never afraid to upstage one. "It was called Exit Charlie. Very good."

I hate it when people drop remarks like that. It means that for the next 20 years, I am going to be keeping an eye open for that damned book. But meanwhile, I am going to urge my vast readership to forget all the above and keep their eyes open for a book that came out in 1972 written by the comedian Shelley Berman, all about the horror of all the hotels he had stayed in. It was published by Price/Stern/Sloan and was called A Hotel is a Place...

He tackles various problems common to most hotels, such as why is there always one door in your hotel room that is locked? Why is there always one switch that controls no light? And why do they put a strip of paper on your toilet seat inscribed SANITISED FOR YOUR PROTECTION?

"What does that strip of paper really mean?" he asks. "While your room was being readied for your occupancy, did a man in a white smock and a face mask and rubber gloves remove the toilet seat, take it downstairs and boil it for 15 minutes? When they replaced it, did they hold it with forceps? Did they use a stainless steel, chromium plated, sterile screwdriver?"

I have often wondered about the provenance of that useless strip of paper. But it never occurred to me to use it in the way that Berman suggests, to help to drive your chambermaid out of her mind. What you do, he says, especially if you're staying for a few days, is this. You take the strip off the toilet seat, keep it in a secret place and put it back on the toilet seat every time you go out. After a couple of days, it will dawn on your maid that you never use the toilet. She starts getting a strange look in her eyes when she sees you. Then, about day three or four, you say to her: "I wonder if you could please do something about that strip on my toilet seat. It's very inconvenient..."

A great book.