GKC Wednesday

Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.

Chesterton Short(s)

Of the 132 clerihews published in the original collection Biography for Beginners (1905) about one-sixth (23) were attributed in whole or in part to "GKC." [The First Clerihews, Oxford, 1982]

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What's that, TDE reader? You don't know what a clerihew is? It's a poem invented by GKC's friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. From Wikipedia: "A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and meter are irregular."