The Slickman A4 Quotation Event 2025
Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban
Dear classics readers,
Tomorrow, February 4th, the annual Slickman A4 Quotation Event (SA4QE) will be taking place to mark the birthday of American author Russell Hoban.
This year will be a particularly special event, as tomorrow marks 100 years since Hoban was born.
So find an A4 sheet of yellow paper and a marker pen . . .
Russell Conwell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania, the son of Ukrainian Jews. His father was the advertising manager of the Jewish Daily Forward and his mother tended a flock of 2,000 pigeons. Hoban served as a radio operator during the Second World War, in the Philippines and Italy, and then worked as a magazine illustrator and advertising copywriter, while also writing a series of bestselling children’s books about an endearingly odd little girl called Frances – whom his wife Lillian, another illustrator, drew as a badger – and a philosophical children’s novel, The Mouse and His Child (1967), about a pair of conjoined mechanical toys.
In 1969, the Hoban family moved to England. The marriage dissolved and Lillian took the children back to the USA, but Russell stayed in London for the rest of his life, writing a number of fantastically peculiar novels for adults, involving lions, sheets of yellow paper, alternate realities, mythology, science fiction and humour.
He is perhaps best remembered for his novel Riddley Walker, set in a post-nuclear Kent, where ancient machines are salvaged for scrap metal and religion is disseminated through Punch and Judy shows. When Hoban died, The Times described him as ‘perhaps the most consistently strange writer of the late 20th century’.
Kleinzeit (1974) is a surreal, metaphysical novel about an advertising copywriter called Kleinzeit (‘Small-time’), who finds himself on hospital ward A4, where patients suffer from skewed hypotenuses, blocked stretti, imbricated noumena and hendiadys.
Through intimate relations with a blank sheet of yellow paper, Kleinzeit explores his own creativity, conversing with various abstract concepts such as Word, Death, Hospital, the Underground and God.
‘Kleinzeit is a sort of holy fool, a fierce, lonely intelligence desperately trying to make sense of a hopeless world,’ wrote Auberon Waugh. Hoban once said that ‘I think there’s most of me in Kleinzeit.’
On Hoban’s birthday each year, fans write favourite quotations on sheets of yellow paper and leave them in public spaces. This annual international occurrence is known as the Slickman A4 Quotation Event, named after Diana Slickman who started it.
Here is a write-up of the 2010 A4 Quotation Event in London by the brilliant
.I encourage you to take part tomorrow! Here are some suggested quotations.
Write one of these on an A4 sheet of yellow paper and leave it somewhere where for people to see. You’ll be joining a worldwide army of fans and celebrating the 100th birthday of an extraordinary writer.
What I am is tired of jam.
from Bread and Jam for Frances
O what we ben! And what we come to!
from Riddley Walker
The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.
from Turtle Diary
I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it.
from The Medusa Frequency
You dont want your mouf to walk you where your feet dont want to go.
from Riddley Walker
Behind the hiss of purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.
from Fremder
“Where are we?” the mouse child asked his father. His voice was tiny in the stillness of the night. “I don’t know,” the father replied. “What are we Papa?” “I don’t know. We must wait and see.”
from The Mouse and His Child
“Alice is somebody that nobody can see,” said Frances. “And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her.”
from A Birthday for Frances
There were no lions any more. There had been lions once.
from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
If you leave a sheet of yellow paper, do take a photograph and share it as a comment below!
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Wow. That was 100% new to me :) Thanks for sharing. Those quotes are amazing.