Late Edition / The Publisher Speaks. Transcript.

Dear Readers,

It is with the greatest regret that after 22 years at Pickman Publishing I must tender my resignation as Chairman of the Board.

From tomorrow there will be a new Chairman, and this will be my last communication to you, my beloved subscribers.

Sir Hugh Berwick-Stanton. Ex-chairman.

It is the night before the publication of our most anticipated issue...heavily advertised, and as heavily oversubscribed. So as a publisher and a gentleman, what I proceed to do.. is... I am sorry, Emilia...I can't go on...

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It is customary in these moments to wish my staff well, consider my prospects for retirement and heap praise and good fortune on my successor.

But the events leading to my resignation prevent such pleasantries.

Frankly it is a disgrace, and if it were not for the tender ears of Emilia, my devoted secretary, I would turn this broadsheet blue with curses.

I have been humiliated by a semi-crazed, barely comprehensible inter-dimensional BOOBIE! and now ejected from one of the highest offices in Fleet Street by a damn foreigner! A German to boot.

...Emilia begs me to calm myself,

 ..my physician, Dr Penrose, declares that a raging temper can inflame the loins.... So.. I will calmly recollect for you the circumstances of my undoing.

Earlier today I was brought an urgent message by a short-trousered tea-urchin from the foreign desk, waving what appeared to be the front page of an erotic penny dreadful.

I quickly surmised its dreadful significance.

It was of course that damned fool - the Drowned Man, a man I never could bear - the pompous, morphine addicted, HALF-WIT!

(yes yes Emilia, I will calm myself, ...my inner thighs are indeed aflame....)

Inflamed Inner Thigh

...that fool! After the strictest instructions to keep his lurid domestic life out of the pages of our respectable journal he quite unaccountably hauled up the skull and cross bones and shot pornorgraphic grapeshot through our sails!

You could hear the sound of pipes and monocles crashing to the floor from Westminister to Piccadilly! A telegram from the Palace appeared with just one exclamation: "BBB...WWWHHHAAARRRTT????!!!!!" signed and sealed with the Royal Signet! The Lord Chancellor was said to have convulsed so hard, his wig flew in the air and was incinerated by a gas-lighter.

Chaos! Disaster! all because that avaricious Bosch Josef Gelthabe wanted to increase subscriptions!

Panic strikes the Palace of Westminster...scuffles, curses etc.

A disaster, but one I was man enough to take full responsibility for, even at the cost of my own honour. I called up The Board and announced the immediate dismissal of The Drowned Man, and suspension of all publications for a month. Both myself and The Board would of course resign, and henceforth hand overt the extant corporation - in legal trust - to the Convent of the Silent Sisters of Southwark.

As a reasonable course of action, I fully expected respectful nods of agreement.. but what I got.. my god.. a stab in the back from that financial weasel.

After a polite cough Gelthabe stood, winked slyly and..in his thick Teutonic accent...delcared:

"Zank you Herr Stanton, vor your resignation - ya - und many gut yers ov service. Zat will be all!!!  Ach Nein Halt!

My face bloomed red with fury, my inner thigh was spasming in fiery agaony...


Bevor you are dizmissed, perhaps you would like - ya - to meet your replacement, and now prinzipal shareholder on ze Board - Crown Prinz... Scheisser!  I mean - Jurgen Horst, partner of Horst Waffen Manufaktur Hamburg!

Jurgen Horst
of Horst Waffen Manufaktur
Hamburg

In he waddled with his supercilious foreign smirk and clicking boots. ME, ME! a true-blooded Englishman replaced by a whiskered Hun. I looked to The Board in disbelief. For the first time I noticed expensive German timepieces on their waiscoats,  and damned spiked Prussian helmets on their bonces. A muted mumbling of excuses tumbled forth..

"Terribly sorry old boy...", "Stumps up...toddle off..", "Got to bite the parsons nipple this time..." etc. etc.

I did not wait.. I turned sadly round, my inner thigh hotter than the Pickman Presses on the morning of a Sunday Supplement.

The last words in my ear were from the backstabber Gelthabe: "Ve muzt not kill ze golden goose. Triple the Drowned Man's Morphine supplies and get ze paper to press.. Achtung!!!"

I have no more to say. It is over. Emilia must drag me home, the lower half of my body does not respond. I will call Penrose.

Goodbye dear readers, your new publisher will greet you in the morn