Library books defaced by prankster playwright Joe Orton go on show

Orton and his boyfriend, Kenneth Halliwell, went to jail for adding surreal gags to dustjackets in guerrilla protest
Library book covers defaced by Joe Orton
One of the library book covers defaced by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell – this one with the addition of a picture of a baboon. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

As crimes go it was not the most heinous of offences, but Islington council's principal law clerk, Sidney Porrett, made it his mission to nab the perpetrators.

"I had to catch these two monkeys," he said. "They were a couple of darlings, make no mistake."

The darlings in question were the playwright Joe Orton and his boyfriend – later murderer – Kenneth Halliwell, and the crimes were taking library books and returning them with comedy collages on the dustjackets.

After a fruitless investigation that involved undercover librarians, Porrett eventually caught the pair in an elaborate sting operation and they went down for six months each.

From Friday, the story of their crimes will be retold by the council, which is putting on display 40 of the 72 dustjackets that the pair defaced.

Islington's local history manager, Mark Aston, said it was the first time the jackets – "they're of international interest I'd say" – had gone on show in this number in the same place, and they shined a light on two fascinating lives and characters.

The crimes stemmed from Halliwell and Orton's unhappiness at the books on offer at Essex Road library.

"They were appalled by what they found," said Aston, stressing that things had much changed since then. "It was endless shelves of rubbish, as they saw it."

Fuming at the selection, the pair decided on a guerrilla protest by systematically stealing books and then doctoring the book cover.

So a biography of John Betjeman now has a picture of an elderly tattooed man in trunks; Collins Guide to Roses has a baboon on it; and Corbett H Thigpen and Hervey M Cleckley's The Three Faces of Eve has an adorable kitten.

In their surrealism some of the gags bring to mind Monty Python and The Goodies, both of which came much later: giant cats, for example, on the cover of an Agatha Christie novel.

The pair were clearly out to shock whoever might happen upon their handiwork, with new titles sometimes applied.

What would a librarygoer in 1960 think in picking up The Collected Plays of Emlyn Williams and finding they were about to read plays called Knickers Must Fall and Fucked by Monty?

They also altered the blurbs for the books in a less than tasteful fashion. Dorothy L Sayers's Gaudy Nights, for example, was the writer "at her most awe inspiring. At her most queer, and needless to say, at her most crude!"

Readers of another of her Lord Peter Wimsey books, Clouds of Witness, are advised to read behind closed doors "and have a good shit while you are reading!"

The pair would sneak the book back on to a shelf and then wait for someone to pick it up so they could watch the reaction.

Orton and Halliwell also, surely much more unacceptably, cut out pages and plates from art books with which to plaster the walls of their flat. "It was library wallpaper," said Aston. "Quite well done actually."

When the library authorities cottoned on to what was happening, they brought in undercover staff from other libraries to try to catch whomever was doing it, and when that failed Porrett had the idea of writing to his number one suspects, Halliwell and Orton.

He wrote alleging an illegally parked car, provoking an incandescent reply from Halliwell lambasting the petty-mindedness of the council and pointing out that they did not have a car.

"Porrett got what he wanted," said Aston. "He got a typed letter which matched the typeface of text on the book jackets."

Soon the police were knocking on the door of their flat in Noel Road and they quickly found book jackets in the process of being doctored and art plates all over the walls.

The two men pleaded guilty at Old Street magistrates and were sent to separate prisons. Their time in jail helped to define their subsequent lives: Halliwell loathed it and attempted suicide; Orton thrived and found his creative juices.

Orton went from strength to strength, achieving stardom with plays such as Loot and Entertaining Mister Sloane, while Halliwell went in the opposite direction, culminating in the awful day in August 1967 when he snapped and bludgeoned the 34-year-old Orton to death with a hammer before taking his own life with an overdose of pills.

The display is in Islington's local history museum until January, and while visitors should enjoy they should not emulate. "Our books are there for people's enjoyment," said Aston. "Come and borrow them but please return them in the same condition you found them."

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