Around The Block

While 1940s' pamphlets warning that Divorce is a Disease and of Hell and its Punishments , might have persuaded readers to seek sanctuary in a happy home, other leaflets produced by the Catholic Truth Society (now Veritas) hinted there could be perils amid bricks and mortar.

For starters there was a risk you could educate your children so highly they became bored with you, warned a pamphlet, whose cover is part of an exhibition at the National Print Museum in Dublin 4 (until Sunday) and is featured in a new book, Vintage Values: Classic Pamphlet Cover Design from Twentieth-Century Ireland (vintagevalues.com).

In the leaflet Why Leave Home . . . a Fr Hall asks twins why young people don't like to visit parents and was told: "Parents often make the mistake, you see, of educating their children to a point where [they] are bored with their parents' companionship."

Meanwhile, the tale of a brave man who visited the home of his ex with his new girlfriend is told in a Church- approved short story The Manor House Mystery. He is imprisoned for his pains: "I was alone in a horrible, musty smelling, secret room, far in the bowels of the earth, shut in by a woman scorned, of whom is said that even Hell, has no fury like her!"