Letter: Crisp always got a reaction

Quentin Crisp's first book was not in fact The Naked Civil Servant ("How we met", Review, 21 July), but a practical guide to window dressing called Colour in Display (Blandford Press, London, 1938) which contains such Crispian insights as "It is easy to subdue rich colour, but not by any means easy to brighten colour that has accidentally become dimmed." During the 1970s, the publishing director of Blandford Press was so affronted by Mr Crisp's rise to notoriety that he hid the last remaining copy of this inoffensive book out of sight behind the library shelves that housed the company's precious backlist archive.

Chris Lloyd

Poole, Dorset