
Pazzo recently picked up John Fowles beat-up old copy of Baedeker’s Southern France, the 1907 edition.

In his novel The Magus, Fowles mentions reading a 1909 Baedeker’s (“Everything interested Alison – the people, the country, the bits in my 1909 Baedeker about the places we passed.”) and there’s a tantalizing reference, in a Times Literary Supplement article about John Fowles library being auctioned off, to how Fowles “drafts a poem in a French Baedeker”.
Was it a French poem? Is this an example of John Fowles famously difficult handwriting?

Is this? Strikingly, it’s no easier to sort out in English.

T-shirts, gift certificates, and an inscribed paperback copy of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (inscribed by me) to anyone who helps sort out this mystery. You should be able to click on the pictures to blow them up – if it doesn’t work, I’ll send along larger pics to anyone interested.