Stationery Moment in Time

Stationery Moment in Time
Man Buys Envelopes from Victorian-Era Shop Clerk

--From "The Directory of Possibilities," edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant, published 1981 by Webb & Bower

In "The Mask of Time," Joan Forman has described many timeslips. Perhaps the oddest concerns a Mr. Squirrel, who in 1973 went into a stationer's shop in Great Yarmouth to buy some envelopes. He was served by a woman in Edwardian dress and bought three dozen envelopes for a shilling. He noticed that the building was extremely silent -- there was no traffic noise. On visiting the shop three weeks later, he found it completely changed and modernized; the assistant, an elderly lady, denied that there had been any other assistant in the shop the previous week.

The envelopes disintegrated very quickly. Forman heard of the case and interviewed Squirrel; he was able to produce for her one of the remaining envelopes. Forman wrote to the manufacturers, who said that such envelopes had ceased to be manufactured 15 years before.