Lilly Library

Lessons in Latrinalia

It was, perhaps, unfair to introduce Allen Walker Read’s Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in the last post without providing a sample entry from it, but Read did not want to distribute the material widely. “Judged merely as reading matter,” he wrote in his preface, “the following work (apart from the Introduction) is abominably, incredibly obscene, and the compiler begs that any one [sic] will lay this book down who is not prepared to look at all social phenomena with the dispassionate eye of the anthropologist and the student of abnormal psychology.” He wasn’t content to prohibit prurience there but had already announced on the title page, “Circulation restricted to students of linguistics, folk-lore [sic], abnormal psychology, and allied branches of the social sciences.” In the contest between knowledge and decency, knowledge won, but decency was preserved, not just by these statements but by the book’s circulation in a mere seventy-five copies.

            Some of Read’s material still sounds obscene, some of it is wholly innocuous — a middling example may illustrate the project without shocking many readers. Under “BALLS The testes,” we find the following inscription from a latrine in Banff, copied on August 2, 1928:

Some come here to sit and think

And write upon the walls

But I come here to shit and stink                        

And pull hair off my balls.

Most of us have read such inscriptions on restroom walls. You’d hear those words and more in any locker room. You correctly assume that the “more” is well-represented in Lexical Evidence.

Herbert Shellans, who taught anthropology and folklore at Phoenix College, in Phoenix, Arizona, met Allen Walker Read at the American Folklore Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, November 21, 1965, where he heard Read deliver a paper titled “Graffiti as a Field of Folklore.” They shared a taxi to the airport, during which they surely talked more graffiti. Like Read, Shellans would publish an important short book, Folk Songs of the Blue Ridge Mountains (1968).  On November 25, Shellans covered a stack of sixty-three 3 x 5 cards with the following note to Read: “Some graffiti for you from New York, North Carolina, Arizona, and Massachusetts. Those from Boston were given me by a former student, Mr. Fred Klickstein.” Shellans was a Brooklyn native, took his graduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and taught in Arizona. Klickstein provided most of the slips, thirty-three of them; Shellans supplied the rest.

Plain notecard with handwriting in blue ink.

            Klickstein turns out to have been a natural collector of latrinalia, with an eye and ear for puns. His slips include stall-wall quips like “Do mountain men keep mountain women?” and “Is grape-nuts a venereal disease?” Latrinalia is often misogynistic, and Klickstein opens a window to Sixties attitudes: “The secretary got fired because she sat in the boss’s lap but wouldn’t admit it.” Klickstein’s slips also remind us that latrinalia is a young man’s game: “How do you find an old man in the dark? Just feel around, it won’t be hard.” I guess I might have found that bon mot clever earlier in life, but I’m now of an age where I resent it. Some of the inscriptions Shellans and Klickstein reported were much cruder than these, and a few involve drawings that can only give offense in a public forum, whether in the 1960s or today. The restroom stall is a liminal space, powerful because it is private and public at the same time.

            Some of Shellans’ contributions to the stack of slips are relatively clean: “In case of enemy attack get behind commode. It hasn’t been hit yet,” a recommendation that’s only too true, as all men with experience of public restrooms (essentially all men) must agree. Shellans encountered that sentiment in the Hill Hall Annex on the University of North Carolina campus, in September of 1957. Later, in the Melrose Bowling Alleys in Phoenix, he read and copied “I bowled a 69,” not nearly as clever as the writer thought nor as clever as his Boston counterparts. In Brooklyn, Shellans collected

Some come here to sit and think,

I came here to shit and stink,

which demonstrates something important: there is a folklore of latrines and restrooms, traditions and variant manifestations of those traditions, which amplifies and (dare I say it) dignifies the expressive value of latrinalia.

Yellowed notecard with blue handwritten text.

            One wonders how Madeline got hold of Shellans’ and Klickstein’s slips — knowing her interests, Read might have given them to her; or, having seen them, she may have captured them from Read’s effects after he died and before they ended up dispersed among dealers and bookstores; or, she had dealers looking out for anything to do with Read, and one of them had the slips. They certainly fit well within her interests: they were lexical, folkloric, and pornographic; and they had belonged to her friend and extended his research in Lexical Evidence, so were sort of appendix to that book. Having collected at least five copies of the one, why not also collect the other?

            The Shellans slips yield other interesting information. First, Shellans collected latrinalia for several years, at least. Second, in Phoenix, Shellans frequented Frontier Bowling Lanes, [J. C.] Penney’s department store, the Christown Shopping Center, the Beefeater Restaurant, the Phoenix Restaurant, the Viking Lounge, and Melrose Bowling Alleys. We all eat and shop, but not everyone bowls. We also know, from the evidence, that Shellans ate at the Beefeater on the same day he went to the shopping center (2/15/65), and that he went to the Viking Lounge on the same day he bowled at Frontier. We see something of the pattern of his life, including his serial collection of restroom graffiti. Thus, there are elements of Shellans’ and Read’s biographies in this artifact, as well as something of the flavor of mid-1960s Phoenix. The archival scholar will not find this surplus of information unusual and will thank Shellans for sending the packet to Read, Madeline for collecting it, and the Lilly Library for making it available more or less forever.

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