envoi

If I was stopped now and then by Crimp’s more mystifying conceits — a Borscht Belt envoi?

When she signs off as “Your loving wife,” the envoi is simultaneously sarcastic and true.

Amid the ordinary gains and losses of the calendar year arrive the vivid envois of the past: a country drugstore, the “kamikaze Fiats” of Rome, a statue of Dante under alpine snow.

An environmental envoi, perhaps, with Buzz washed up on a beach alongside other jetsam, or clogging the gullet of a whale?

It said it was “once again inviting literature lovers and bibliophiles to see Proust’s work in a new light through 70 lots of literary manuscripts, letters and books with envois”.