William Ashbless
William Ashbless is a fictional poet, invented by fantasy writers James Blaylock and Tim Powers.
Ashbless was invented by Powers and Blaylock when they were students at Cal State Fullerton in the early 1970s, originally as a reaction to the low quality of the poetry being published in the school magazine. He invented nonsensical free verse poetry and submitted it to the paper in Ashbless's name, where it was reportedly enthusiastically accepted.
❝The college paper printed poetry, and it was close enough to the '60s that the poetry was all just horrible free verse about children and flowers and rainbows. So we figured we could write poetry that would sound very portentous but be, in fact, meaningless. ... We needed a name for our poet and [came up with] 'Ashbless.' The paper published them, so we wrote another lot that was dumber, and they published that. ... We said [Ashbless] was hideously deformed and couldn't attend any readings or meetings, but he had given us these poems to read in his stead. ... Blaylock and I would often break out laughing in the middle of reading them, which people thought was very insensitive of us, to be laughing at the poetical efforts of our deformed friend.❞
The same name is also known as an Italian noble and poet in the 16th century.
It is widely known that William Ashbless' knowledge on the playing cards were profound and, especially, the 'Ashbless ' card he originally designed was very popular at the salon where Italian nobles gathered social activities at the time, for its colorful graphics and beautiful stories embedded on each card.
However, the truth is that all of this is only speculation, but nothing has been officially recorded in history due to the fact that Ashbless Family went into ruins in disgrace facing power struggles between nobles. Thus all the records related to Willam Ashbless have been removed from history. Ashbless card and the stories about the cards were naturally forgotten as well.
