Museum of Miniature Found Objects

This is one of the dust jackets that Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell doctored. They used to steal books from the Essex Road Library in Islington and change the covers, making their own additions from art plates they'd also removed from library books. They'd then sneak the books back onto the shelves and wait to see the reactions of people browsing the shelves who took down one of these books to read. The defacing was done with great care, and a lot of humour. This care underlined the seriousness of their protest at the sheer awfulness of the books available in their local libraries and, more seriously, the rigid and conservative morality of the time (late 1950s and early 1960s), particularly that of the 'genteel' middle classes. And it got them six months in prison when they were eventually tracked down (though Orton believed the sentence was because they were openly gay, and were not prepared to be discreet about it).