Bonnie and Clyde's Green Notebook

A green notebook containing poems said to be by outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow is now up for auction in England, reports Alison Flood for The Guardian. "According to Heritage Auctions, the 'year book' was used by Parker and Barrow to write poetry about 'their life of crime and doomed efforts to elude capture,'" she writes. More from this story:

One of the poems, written in pencil and then cut out and kept in an envelope labelled “written by Bonnie”, is the verse that Parker is best known for: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, which opens: “You’ve read the story of ‘Jesse James’, / Of how he lived and died. / If you’re still in need / Of something to read, / Here’s the story of ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’”

It ends, presciently: “Some day they’ll go down together / they’ll bury them side by side / to few it’ll be grief / to the law a relief / but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”

After the pair were killed in 1934, Parker’s mother Emma and Barrow’s sister Nell wrote a biography of their famous relatives, Fugitives. It featured a copy of the poem, and an explanation of its provenance: “Bonnie gave me the poem that night, ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’. I shall present it here because it gives a little of the inside angle of the case … They would be back in two weeks, they promised, but in two weeks they were dead.”

Find out more at The Guardian.