photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

In 1997, Boston College acquired items from the estate of the Irish novelist, journalist, and gadfly Flann O’Brien (1911–66). Along with approximately 14,000 manuscript pages and O’Brien’s library of 500-odd books, the University’s curators catalogued his fedora, violin (seldom played), passport, diary, hand lens, fountain pen, and Underwood typewriter. On this last he wrote his best-known, modernist novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), and likely also “Cruiskeen Lawn,” his satirical thrice-weekly column in the Irish Times, where he once famously termed members of the Irish Parliament unfit for “minding mice at crossroads.”