Joe Orton

• KOOS Couvée’s piece about the performance artist dramatising the “defacing” by Joe Orton and Ken Halliwell of books in Essex Road library, reminded me of my time as a scenic painter on the biopic Prick Up Your Ears, starring Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina (Retyping Mr Orton… one man’s tribute to playwright, January 27).

The production designer, Hugo Luczic Wyhowski, brought hundreds of remaindered books for me to alter the covers and illustrations with lewd, humorous collages. I cut up colour supplements, advertising material and concert handouts to obtain the desired effects and pasted all of the cut-outs onto the books.

During filming, some of the books and a framed picture, mistakenly believed to be the work of Orton and Halliwell, went missing.

It always gives me cause for amusement to think of someone somewhere content that they have in their possession artefacts created by the Islington pair.

BOB STARRETT Barbican, EC2