Elizabeth Cobbold — The Monitory Lizard — Notebook

A valentine cut from paper about 1823, and the verse written beneath it, looked at closely and at actual size. Then pages of your own.

The document

Elizabeth Cobbold cut a lizard among leaves and grasses out of a sheet of white paper about twenty-four centimeters across. A sheet of red lies behind it, so the red shows wherever the paper was taken away. Beneath it, in ink, two stanzas: “The Monitory Lizard tells / With warning Voice; where Danger dwells.” Monitory meant “giving admonition; warning.”

For nearly twenty years the Cobbolds held a party at Ipswich on the evening of St. Valentine’s Day. For it, her memoirist wrote, she “designed, composed, and executed” a set of valentines, “generally to the number of eighty.” The guests drew them by lot, and the prize was meant to foretell a marriage in the coming year.

Inside the notebook

First, twenty-three pages on the document: the valentine on its leaf of the album; who made it; four details, the head at twice actual size, the tail, and the two stanzas at actual size with their words enlarged; the party; two more leaves of the same album, an owl and a pyramid of the word ABRACADABRA; and the shirt Métrica prints from it.

Then 96 pages of your own: 68 ruled and 28 dot grid.

A5, spiral-bound, it lies flat.

Elizabeth Cobbold, Lizard, about 1823 · The New York Public Library, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, Pforz Acc 22-007 · Public domain in the United States, in the Library’s judgment