In 1906 he was approached by Stefana Stevens a "clever young woman" who worked for Curtis Brown, a London literary agency founded in 1899.

He was having tea with Cecil Chesterton at the St George's in St Martin's Lane, when she leant across the table and said: It did not take much thinking about; he sketched a synopsis the next day and two days later Curtis Brown had a contract for him with the publisher Chapman and Hall, whose office was also in Henrietta Street; and to his “further amazement” the unwritten book was also sold to Dodd, Mead in New York, for "respectable royalties" in both countries.

He went off to Cartmel with crates of books and had more sent by the London Library, and "settled down at Wall Nook to be Hazlitt, Lamb and Leigh Hunt all rolled into one."

As illustrator he selected Fred Taylor, impressed by his black-and white poster of a newsboy used to advertise the bookseller W. H.

It is a long discourse and a guide to Bohemian London in the early twentieth century, between the eras of Enoch Soames and Ezra Pound.