The club of queer trades

The Club of Queer Trades is a collection of stories by G. K. Chesterton first published in 1905.Each story in the collection is centered on a person who is making his living by some novel and extraordinary means (a “queer trade”, using the word “queer” in the sense of “peculiar”). To gain admittance one must have invented a unique means of earning a living and the subsequent trade being the main source of income.StoriesThe framing narrative by “Cherub” Swinburne describes his quest for The Club of Queer Trades with his friend Basil Grant, a retired judge, and Rupert Grant, a private detective who is Basil’s younger brother. Each of the stories describes their encounter with one of the trades…Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936), was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is often referred to as the “prince of paradox”. Time magazine has observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.”Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an “orthodox” Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his “friendly enemy”, said of him, “He was a man of colossal genius.” Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin…William Ellis Mears (1868 – 1945) William E. Mears was active/lived in New York.