The Club of Queer Trades

The Club of Queer Trades
by G.K.Chesterton

Chapter 1
The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had
something to do with the designing of the things called flats in England
and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of
economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors
and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets
anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that
the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be
thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the
passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives.
The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the
Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland
Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as one passes
through the twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a
Strangers' Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in
Norfolk Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries,
no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a
great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.
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
accumulated 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.
Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my
revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer
Trades, which, as I have said, was one of this class, one which I was
almost bound to come across sooner or later, because of my singular
hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis call me facetiously `The King
of Clubs'. They also call me `The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and
youthful appearance I have presented in my declining years. I only

hope the spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have. But
the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing
about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by
me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic,
and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.
Very few people knew anything of