Hands Down

• Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles by John Welchman
  Yale, 416 pp, £35.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 300 06530 2

The literary strength of this country rests in the safe keeping of its advertising copywriters, a species properly deserving respect. In recent years a gin manufacturer ran a series of cinema commercials. The screen, shaded bottle-green to evoke the green-bottled gin, would be captioned something like ‘frogs leaping on a baize table on a grassy field’. These ads might have been produced by Alphonse Allais, the humorist of the late 19th-century burlesque salons of the Incohérents in Paris.