Susan and I worked together, as Librarian and Driver respectively, on a Surrey County Council Travelling Library. We met a great many people, from all walks of life and made many friends. Susan was excellent at her job and readers were constantly enquiring about the latest works from a myriad of authors. This required that she kept abreast of all the new publications for which she was likely to be asked.
Lawrence Durrell produced a work, for which he chose the title “TUNC”, which Susan tells me, is Latin for ‘THEN’. The publishers, for reasons at which we can all guess, elected to print the title in a rather unusual style. All the letters were lower case and all looked pretty much alike, at about an inch-and-a-half in height. The ‘t’ looked like a ‘c’ with a vestigial bar to differentiate it, the ‘u’ was a ‘c’ turned on its back, the ‘n’ was an inverted version of the ‘u’ and the ‘c’ finished off the word!
A very well-to-do lady approached the counter one day and asked Susan, “Do you have the new Lawrence Durrell book in stock? I don’t know the title, but it is a four-letter word beginning with ‘C’.” Snigger, snigger we went!