Joe’s handwriting was famously a puzzle to decipher. Responding to a letter from him in November 1975, Frederic Raphael wrote: ‘I don’t think I have ever seen your handwriting before. I am not sure that I have seen it now.  To be sure, you should supply your readers with winkling hooks, like those they issue with the re-shelled escargots, so that one might extract the last ounce – I think the first ounce – of flesh from your words.  I think I have managed it…’

Here are a stray page of a draft review, a draft stanza from one of Joe’s Winchester party pieces, and a near-final draft of the Carpe Diem English version written for P.G.Longhurst:

1. 
   

   For P.G.Longhurst