As an advocate for Carroll’s legacy, Hillman would give amusing lectures on the flat earth concept, perhaps as a way to combine his newfound whimsical nonsense humor, as though Wonderland and Shenton’s earth were confused. Hillman was also president of the Lewis Carroll Society, re-established in 1969. Johnson contended that Hillman exhibited a lack of conviction-and rightly so. Despite not being a sign maker, as Shenton was, he felt a nudge, a prod, a higher calling to Shenton’s public profession.
Halfway across the face of the earth, in San Francisco, California, a certain forty-eight year-old Charles Johnson, who had corresponded with Shenton for nearly a decade and remained an enthusiastic IFERS member in doing so, hoped to relieve Lillian of the burden. Therefore, nobody else had a right to his lifetime collection of work but him.
Despite the ridicule which Shenton was forced to endure, the politician had nuzzled up to him and served faithfully at his side. Lack of enthusiasm aside, he alone was Shenton’s natural successor- this, according to Hillman. And besides, he’d read all about Zetetic astronomy in the British Library. For Hillman, ancient cosmology was merely an interesting idea, something he might even go on talking about in his spare time. The IFERS had dwindled to a handful of members, and not even its own president, Ellis Hillman, a Greater London council member, believed the earth to be flat. Without Shenton-or rather, without another Shenton to fill his shoes nobody seemed to have any hope of knowing the true shape of the earth they were standing on. Stacks of books and papers and boxes, undoubtedly chaotic with correspondences, remained. It was 1972, and as the crew of the Apollo 17 readied to photograph the Blue Marble on NASA’s final moon mission, Lillian was faced with the prospect of what to do with her late husband’s work.
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