The Club of Queer Trades
1905
What if the only requirement for joining a club was inventing an entirely new way to make a living? This is the delicious premise at the heart of Chesterton's 1905 collection, where London hides a society of eccentrics, each more improbable than the last. A retired major confronts a threat involving yellow pansies. A collector of fines discovers the dark side of his peculiar profession. A man opens a shop that sells absolutely nothing. These are not tall tales told in pubs, but carefully reasoned adventures where logic bends itself into knots and then, somehow, snaps back into sense. Chesterton writes with the joy of someone who has found a new toy: each story is a little engine of absurdity, powered by genuine affection for his oddball characters and their even odder trades. The humor feels distinctly Edwardian, warm and whimsical, but beneath the comic surface lies something sharper. For Chesterton, eccentricity is a form of defiance, a refusal to be flattened into conformity. If you've ever suspected that the world takes itself too seriously, these stories are your antidote.
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“Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?””
— G. K. Chesterton
“There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it it really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the doing's of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a word.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“What is the modern mind?" asked Grant."Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive --and faces the facts of life seriously." At this moment another roar of laughter came from within.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“He spoke in that sweet and steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practiced for hours together in his bedroom.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Of the last two friends of yours who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other thought it right to eat men...””
— G. K. Chesterton
“We have eternity to stretch our legs in.””
— G. K. Chesterton
