As majority shareholder in Genevoise des Pompes Funèbres, a prosperous funeral business founded by his maternal grandfather Alois Graber in 1919, Felix Zeichen (1949-2007) combined wealth and eccentricity in equal degree. Packed off to California by his father to study state-of-the-art undertaking methods in the early 1970s, Zeichen did his best to comply with the paternal injunction while at the same time contriving to spend a considerable portion of his time on Catalina Island where, following an enthusiastic initial visit, he purchased Holly Hill House, a quaint hillside dwelling with a green- and red-striped conical cupola, built in 1889 by one Peter Gano with the assistance—as legend would have it—of his blind horse Mercury.

Once installed, Zeichen gathered around him a motley crew of artists, tricksters and loafers with whom he shared his fondness for daily sea-bathing irrespective of weather conditions and elaborate afternoon teas in the course of which he would insist on playing charades with his guests, rewarding them with chocolate money and toy watches imported from his native land.

On his return to Geneva in 1979, Zeichen was appointed managing director of the family concern and in the early 1980s revolutionized the Swiss funeral industry, first with the introduction of the ‘eco-casket’, an environment-friendly, bio-degradable coffin that was efficiently absorbed into the earth and of which virtually no trace remained just months after inhumation, and later with the construction of the Crans-Montana Hypogeum, a daring architectural project executed by Pritzker Prize laureate Baltasar Beltrán. Built on—or to be more accurate, beneath—three hectares of astronomically expensive turf beside Lake Moubra in the heart of the Swiss mountain resort, the Hypogeum was designed and marketed as an ecumenical but hardly economical last resting place for ‘individuals of high net worth’ whose vanity and general desire for self-aggrandizement exceeded what could reasonably be accomodated at any of the existing cemeteries in the region. The subterranean vault conceived by Beltrán consists of just 25 burial plots of varying size and configuration, the more spacious among them offering the defunct tenant or tenants ample opportunity to dramatize their posterity by means of statuary, tableaux vivants and other visual representations. Among the first to be housed in the Hypogeum was the tragic billionaire nymphomaniac brewery heiress Baroness Franziska von Stanfield-Tripcovich (née Heidi Schmidt), flatteringly embalmed and placed inside a perspex dome at the wheel of her blood-red 1968 Ferrari 500 ‘Superfast’ Coupé, the passenger seat occupied by a hyper-realistic silicone sculpture of a leather-jacketed gigolo sporting an eyepatch and a three-day beard. In accordance with her final will and testament Stanfield-Tripcovich wears a pair of wrap-around titanium-alloy ski-glasses and a powder-blue shahtoosh turtleneck embroidered with gold sequins spelling out the words A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND.

In 1998, under the auspices of a non-profit organization founded by Genevoise des Pompes Funèbres and devoted to fomenting the literary and visual arts (the extravagant fashion and style bible [sic] was the organization’s first undertaking), Zeichen launched Hypergram Press with the dual mission of publishing fiction and non-fiction books of the highest possible material quality and generously nurturing a stable of authors whose creative talent, he believed, would blossom once they were liberated from the dreary imperatives of commercial viability. And while many established littérateurs tut-tutted the idea of being published on the back of revenue siphoned off from a funeral home, it was precisely this somewhat morbid aspect that appealed to a trendy new generation of writers, many of them hitherto unpublished. When cult columnist Sybil Leopardi’s outlandish first novel Outing Prince Albert was accepted for publication as the first title under the Hypergram imprint, with Charles Parmentier’s distinctive pen-and-cross logo on the spine and the title page and a congealed globule of the author’s blood enshrined under a tiny convex bubble inset in the back cover of each copy of a limited edition of 4,444, the house gained instant credibility with a certain literary avant-garde and the flow of manuscripts arriving at the luxurious lakeside villa in Coppet where Zeichen had set up office soon turned from a trickle to a torrent.

Always a stickler for detail whenever hearses, tombstones, coffins and embalming fluids were involved, Zeichen was likewise a self-confessed ‘comma-fucker’ (and hyphen-fucker into the bargain) when it came to copy-editing, obsessively ordering galleys—regardless of cost—until the slightest trace of confusion and inconsistency was exorcised from the manuscripts he had undertaken to publish. To this end he retained the consulting services of renowned London copy-editor Cyril Brack, tempting him away from tea and biscuits at his gloomy Bayswater bedsitter and installing him in the terraced penthouse at Coppet. When not toiling over the often rebarbative syntax and punctuation of the Hypogram authors, Brack could more often than not be seen at the helm of Zeichen’s vintage Riva Ariston runabout Madame de Staël as it sped across the tranquil waters of Lake Geneva with one or another of the city’s jeunesse dorée drugged and smugly sprawled beside him.

A list of the twenty-one titles published by the imprint in its first year of activity affords some idea of the breadth and quality Zeichen achieved from the outset:

Outing Prince Albert, Sybil Leopardi
Dandruff on a Black Lacoste, Chad Brunt
Effervescence, Poona Li Hung
Mike Hunt, Antoinette Abernethy
Wobbleboard, Vernon Slutzkin
Molière’s Tooth, David Blount
Self-Reverential, Diana Suárez
Utter Drivel, Gerhard Duft
Suffragette in Leatherette, Katia Dikov
The Year Drag Queen Won Ascot, Katia Dikov
Eleven Evelyns in the Netherlands, Adam Snow
Blank Cheque, Adam Snow
Just One Second, Sebastian Slough
Losing the Plot, Andy Constable
Dago in a Kilt, Giorgio McFarlane
Huge Flaps, Wilma K. Driscoll
Sculpture Garden, Douglas Moss
Rubbing Shoulders, Xanthia Dunlop
Exact Sex Acts, Mariuccia Monteverdi
My Life for Corinne Luchaire, Jean-Jacques Brugevin
Fantabulosa, Lubin Palmer III

As Zeichen’s enthusiasm for the Hypogram project increased to the detriment of his day-to-day preoccupation with the funeral business, his board of directors grew steadily more nervous and in 2001 he succumbed to internal pressure and relinquished all his responsibilities within Genevoise des Pompes Funèbres. Shortly after his resignation he purchased historic Featherstonehaugh Manor near Perranporth in Cornwall and sought to recreate there—albeit on a grander scale—the creative coterie he had brought together twenty-odd years before on Catalina Island.

To cope with the considerable expense of not only maintaining Featherstonehaugh and environs but also attending to the livelihood of the fluid community of oddballs that had taken up residence there, Zeichen devised a dotty but implausibly profitable equity-investment scheme modelled on the theory of the Random Walk and according to which the decisions to buy and sell were taken exclusively under the influence of LSD. One of artist Charles Parmentier’s more unusual commissions was to adapt for Zeichen the ancient mythological Ouroborus motif—a snake biting its own tail—for its reproduction on the minuscule tiles of acid the entrepreneur absorbed prior to making his weekly investment choices. With his personal assistant Lavinia L’Estrange at the wheel, Zeichen would leave Featherstonehaugh Manor on Wednesday morning in his trusty old Peugeot 404 ambulance and motor up to the limestone cliffs overlooking Perranporth Cove.

Having unloaded wicker picnic basket, rugs and shooting-sticks, Zeichen and L’Estrange would erect a tent-like lean-to next to the Peugeot to protect them from the wind and install themselves with the week’s international financial press. When Zeichen, who invariably swallowed his tablet of acid just before setting out, sensed that he was ‘peaking’ he would begin to dictate buy and sell orders to his assistant while helping himself to copious amounts of weak Earl Grey tea from a battered tartan thermos. Punctilious in his formulation and repetition of this ritual, Zeichen was able to boast a return on investment of 39% in his first year of trading. Whether he would have continued to so spectacularly outperform the market is a moot point given that on 20th April 2007, while already tripping and apparently seeking some kind of inspiration from the elements about what course of action to adopt regarding a sizeable bundle of Public Body shares purchased on a lysergic whim a month before, he stood up and ventured to the very edge of the limestone cliff, kept walking like a cartoon character magically suspended in space, frantically pedalling the air with his legs, and then plummeted more than a hundred metres to his death, his body dashed on the foaming rocks of the wild Cornish coastline below. With Zeichen’s ghastly death-fall still reflected in her sea-green eyes Lavinia jumped into the Peugeot, set the ambulance siren wailing like a banshee, and dashed back to Featherstonehaugh Manor to deliver the tragic news.