The Club of Queer Trades : Original Text

The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told.

It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living.

It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules.

First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade.

Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog.

The principle (as Sir Bradcock Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same.

Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor.

Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them.

Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough.

It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.

That I should have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have 4accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum.

At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged.

I will recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League.