“It was sometime between 1930 and 1933, in the city of Papeete on the island of Tahiti, when an American expatriate painter named Edgar Leeteg walked into a shop that sold art supplies. . . . As was Leeteg’s habit, he flirted with the young Chinese woman behind the counter. Then he asked her to sell him some monk’s cloth, a type of canvas. ‘I need it to paint on,’ he explained.

‘We’re all out of monk’s cloth,’ the clerk told him. . . .

Then the clerk, on the verge of losing a sale, suddenly remembered that the shop’s owner had been pushing her to unload an overstock of another type of fabric. ‘How about some velveteen?’ she asked. ‘Could you paint on that?’”

—Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, from Poplorica, 2004.