JOHN WILLIAMS

Of the four founder members of the Transformationalists we know most about John Williams. This is largely due to the biographical information included on the flyleaf of his novel, "Mirrorrorrim", published in 1919 by Normacot Books. We even know that at the time of the book`s publication he was living at 563, Uttoxeter Road, Meir, Stoke-on-Trent, thanks to the congratulatory postcard sent by Frederick Hammersley.

John Williams was born in Crewe on March 17th 1875. John`s father was a railwayman who moved his family to the town of Longton in the Potteries in 1880. John was expected to follow in his father`s footsteps but being of a more academic nature, he pursued a different course. He took a position as shop assistant in a stationer`s and then, following the opening of the Sutherland Institute in 1899, he became an assistant librarian. The Sutherland Institute (which still stands next to the A50 in Longton) was named after the Duke of Sutherland, who donated the land, and was built to celebrate Queen Victoria`s Diamond Jubilee. The Prince of Wales laid the foundation stone and the American ambassador performed the official opening ceremony. The building housed both the Public Library and a Technical College, which included a School of Art. One presumes that this was where John Williams was introduced to Transformationalism.

The story of the conception of "Mirrorrorrim" is well-known but I will repeat it here. Apparently it was Frederick Hammersley`s idea to construct a printing press to issue posters and pamphlets for the Transformationalists. He also proposed a quarterly journal to be entitled `Labrador Current`, but as far as I know, this never came to fruition. Matthew Darlington was given the task of constructing the machine but when he came to make the `slugs` for the typeface he forgot to reverse the images of the letters. Thus at their first attempt to use the machine, the words came out backwards. In a fit of temper, Darlington destroyed the useless type but not before his mistake had planted the seed of an idea in John Williams` fertile brain. He decided to write a novel, a novel unlike any other. The left-hand page would be printed normally, the right-hand page would have the same text reversed. As the story progressed so the mirrored pages would diverge. This was the basis for "Mirrorrorrim". Originally he planned to use Darlington`s reversed typeface but then he realised that this would make it easy for the reader to hold the reversed pages up to a mirror to read the book. He then decided it would be better to use a standard typeface but to set the right-hand pages backwards. This would force the reader to read backwards, tfel ot thgir instead of left to right.

The so-called `Darlington` edition of "Mirrorrorrim" was published in 1919. It contained a fair number of mistakes but Williams accepted these with equanimity, even suggesting that they improved his original text. Several other publishers have attempted to reprint the work down the years but all have opted to revise the `Darlington` edition and correct the obvious inaccuracies. The Inverted Tree Press have promised a completely faithful `Darlington` edition of "Mirrorrorrim" for the new millennium.

The biographical details on the flyleaf of the original "Mirrorrorrim" end with the following sentence: `Mr. Williams is currently writing his second book, which is entitled: "A History Of Greenland: A Work Of Fiction"`. Unfortunately nothing more is known of this.

An art class at the Sutherland Institute. Note the strange headgear of the gentleman in the middle.

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