Be good.

It's been a while since I did a book post on a Wednesday, but don't get all happy -- I am not prepared with time or commitment to bring back the Humpback Writers feature. That, of course, never involved writers with hunched backs, but ran on Hump Day, and was and remains the worst name for a book feature online. So no, I'm not doing that right now.

Nevertheless, it is Wednesday, and here's a book. 

The Good Citizen's Handbook: A Guide to Proper Behavior, compiled by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz and published in 2001, is a look back at handbooks from the 1930s to the 1960s, designed to help Americans live healthy, worthy, happy lives. 

The pages inside are not altered from the original handbooks, except for the addition of headers ("A Good Citizen..."). To the credit of the writer and publisher, the book's endnotes have citations for all of the originals, printed in the smallest type you ever saw in your life. 

So let's get to it: What ought a citizen do in order to be a Good Citizen? 

All right! But surely there's more to it than that?

Hmm. Seems a bit familiar, yes? Like everything being shouted at the citizenry in 2020? Not that it's bad advice for avoiding being sick, but it was also our Civic Duty to ruin our lives to save them in 2020. So is this old pamphlet really goofy and out of touch, when it was exactly what we saw four years ago, just with updated clothing on the models?

In fact, while the book looks like it's intended to poke fun at the earnestness and innocence of the past (à la Nick and Nite's "How to Be Swell"), it can't help but shine a light on the aspirations of an America that wanted to be better and safer for all its citizens. 

Better dressed, too. 

I like the "Clean Play" page. The rules of good sportsmanship are the same as they always were. But the last professional sportsman to follow them that I know of was Barry Sanders, who didn't show off or brag when he scored his many touchdowns and show up the other team. These days we tell kids in school not to be dickweeds, but then we behave like dickweeds ourselves everywhere else. More is caught than taught.

Happiness through purpose, friendship, communication, exercise, and faith. This is the precise advice we still from mental health professionals, except that now the “spiritual values” one is always (and I mean always, 100% of the time) illustrated by photo of a young woman meditating in the lotus position.

This book may have been compiled to chuckle at the innocence of the past, but what sane person would not prefer to live in a society where people really do want to strengthen the republic, help one another, and bolster goodwill? "Today good citizenship means less to us," writes McKnight-Trontz in the introduction. "We worry far more about our demons than our duties.... We belong to fewer civic groups, vote less, and spend far more time doing things ourselves, for ourselves. No wonder it feels like everything is going to Hell." And that was written before the invention of the smartphone! 

Of course, the America of the 1930s through the 1960s had all the problems we can imagine -- tragic family trauma, addiction, racism, poverty, corruption, misogyny, war, whatever else you want to add. Despite that it was a high-trust society, especially compared to the current moment. Two-tiered justice systems, handwave treatment of violent criminals, election theft, tribalism, stores locking up goods, institutions run by fools chosen for the shallowest reasons, children being miseducated if educated at all -- this is all part of our new low-trust society. The Good Citizen's Handbook is a window to the past, not as it was but as those living then wished it could be. We don't even have that now. Whenever I see art depicting a hopeful future now it shows a multiculti group of young people, no children or oldsters, dressed like bums, doing no work, and if a white male is in it, he's probably dressed like a woman or a unicorn. The future is dumb.

Sadly, the handbook is out of print, although as I write this McKnight-Trontz has another Chronicle Books title out: How to Be Popular. Which I know I could use. Perhaps then I could learn How to Be Swell. Nick at Nite didn't really help that much. 

Fred's Book Club: Such Tripe!

It is Wednesday, which is Hump Day, and that means it's time for the Humpback Writers, our serious book feature with the silly name. To date no actual humps on the writers have been detected, despite our best efforts. In fact, today's author/artist, while being a bit advanced in years, still has no sign of back problems, as one can see on his Web page. 

Yes, today we're profiling British cartoonist Bill Tidy, and specifically one book-length installment of his long-running cartoon saga, The Fosdyke Saga (a takeoff on the novel and TV series The Forsyte Saga). And if you stay to the end of today's post, you'll see an interesting connection between this comic strip and a notorious case currently in the papers.

When I was a kid, I loved comic strips, especially the funny ones. What would prove to be my favorite form was not the straight gag or the adventure stories, but the rarest and most difficult -- the continuing story that still had a daily punchline. Strips like Thimble Theatre and Little Nemo were known for it, but they were long gone. It was a vanished breed in my youth, at least in America, but across the pond Bill Tidy had been writing and drawing one since 1971 for the Daily Mirror. The Fosdyke Saga featured the various adventures of the Fosdyke clan, Britain's greatest tripe-selling family, and their ongoing struggles in the Edwardian era and beyond, especially against the nefarious rival Roger Ditchley. The adventures centered around selling tripe, promoting the public's awareness of tripe, inventing new uses for tripe (tripe parachute!), fending off various wicked persons, and acquiring rare tripe-related objects for their tripe museum (on the book cover above you can see the South American tripe pyramid, composed completely of dried tripe). 

From the front matter

I bought the above book (the last in the series) at the Forbidden Planet store in the Village. While a lot of the humor (or humour) was lost on this young American at the time, I still thought it was brilliant, funny, endlessly inventive, and a veritable a circus of great characters.

Tidy maintained interest with cliffhangers and rotating storylines. In one adventure in the book above, adventurous son Tom Fosdyke has been dispatched to the Arctic Circle to seek the Arctic Tripe Snake!

Meanwhile, in Manchester, youngest and strongest son Tim has had a breakdown following a plot of Ditchley's to convince the Fosdykes they are haunted! Unfortunately the doctor leaves much to be desired....

Meanwhile Jos, head of the family, is stuck in a pub, where he is spying on a devious plan to rob a bank and pin the blame on his own horse, the mighty and faithful Tripeworks!!!! (!!!)

I loved the format and desperately wanted to create a comic strip like that for the American market. Unfortunately by the time I was coming of age, newspapers were starting to die and the comics pages were shrinking, a shadow of what they once were -- and that was before the Internet just about delivered the coup de grace. 

But that came much earlier for Tidy at the Mirror. In 1984 the Mirror was acquired by Robert Maxwell, MP, who didn't think Bill Tidy was funny, and cast him out. Tidy had been at the paper since the fifties, so this was a pretty big blow. The thing that saddened Bill most was that he'd planned to extend the Fosdyke adventures much longer:

“It was a very sad day when, with forty years of the Fosdyke story told, the Mirror’s new management decided to axe the strip [in 1985]. Fosdykes at Dunkirk, The Salford Blitz, the place of tripe production in the Marshall Plan, the possibility of free school tripe under the terms of the 1944 Education Act. All these stirring events are ready chronicled and simply need the light of day — a nation waits.”

But alas, that was the end. The Fosdyke saga, which had been adapted into radio plays, a TV show, and a stage play, came to a close. And people wonder why hardly anyone eats tripe anymore.

Here's the kicker I mentioned at the top: Robert Maxwell, who later annoyed New Yorkers by buying the Daily News, perished in 1991 in a bizarre incident where he apparently fell off his yacht naked while peeing in the ocean (as one does). Murder and suicide were ruled out (hmm); death by heart attack that caused drowning was the coroner's deduction. Maxwell had defaulted on a fifty million pound loan, which set off a feeding frenzy among his creditors, and his publishing empire came to the same fate as did he, minus the peeing.

More recently, Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine has been much in the news. As I write, she still faces serious charges for her dealings with the late Jeffrey Epstein, who probably did not kill himself. That story is, shall we say, tripe. The question is whether she can bargain her silence for freedom, based on the high rollers that went to Pedo Island under her watch. 

But on goes Bill Tidy, drawing and doing many other things, and God bless him. His is the kind of saga one should emulate, not that of the strange and awful Maxwells. 

Fred's Book Club: And What About Shrinky Dinks?

It's Hump Day! And that means it's time for our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers! It's the stress of carrying Wednesday on their backs that causes the injury, you know, and.... Oh, skip it. I'm thinking of changing the name of the feature to the U#TIG’Hd836& Writers, which will make about as much sense. 

Today we go back in time, back to our younger days, or even the days before we were born, to ask the musical question... Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?

Freelance journalist Gael Fishingbauer Cooper and PR agent Brian Bellmont created this project, and publisher Perigree turned it into a book in 2011. It's a fabulous collection of things pegged to the 1970-1990 era, especially for things that kids loved. That's an important feature, because most of us are at least a little nostalgic for the world of our childhood, and because nothing goes in and out of fashion faster than kid stuff. 

The book is a series of articles, arranged alphabetically, about the things of the past, and at the end of each there's a summation of its status in the current time (as of 2011), written as its "X-Tinction Rating." Here's one:

TIME FOR TIMER

TV was pretty lecturey in the 1970s and 1980s. Somewhere along the line, someone panicked that kids weren't eating proper snacks and decided the way to solve that was to offer nutritional advice from a yellow blob of fat with spindly legs and a ginormous hat. Thus, the birth of Timer, a disturbing but memorable PSA star whose segments were apparently dashed off by a bored but starving copywriter who had to make deadline before he could hit the drive-thru for a Big Mac.

     Timer's most memorable video has him "hankering for a hunka cheese," but any kid who needed to be shown how to place cheese between two crackers was really too dumb to be allowed to watch TV. In another, Timer takes a tour of the stomach and then apparently just gives up, encouraging kids to eat random leftovers out of the fridge. "Sunshine on a Stick" oversells the result by half, as it's just orange juice frozen in ice-cube trays. Timer also shows up in a segment demonstrating toothbrushing, which is odd when you consider that his teeth are as yellow as the rest of him.

 

X-TINCTION RATING: Gone for good.

REPLACED BY: Nothing. Television networks have since decided that kids can eat random food out of the fridge without frightening cartoon guidance. 

You get the idea. Each little profile is snappily written, with good humor, and appropriate kudos for products and other cultural phenomena that really came through.

Not everything is X-Tinct, either. Take those Shrinky Dinks:

SHRINKY DINKS

Invented in 1973, Shrinky Dinks brought into play the one appliance that Mom never really wanted you to mess with: the oven. In fact, the whole Shrinky Dink process seemed kind of like a joyous, don't-tell-the-parents experiment. Melting plastic on a hot cookie sheet without getting yelled at? Sign us up! 

     Shrinky Dinks never looked like they were going to work. You colored in the shape, be it a Smurf, Mr. T, or a rainbow-maned unicorn, threw it on a cookie sheet, and hoped for the best. Watching through the oven door, you were convinced you'd done it wrong and nothing would ever happen when suddenly it started to curl up like an old sheet of fax paper. It twisted, and then fixed itself, and the end product was tiny, bright and colorful, and thick and strong. As with Homer Simpson and his Flaming Moe drink, fire made it good.

     Few kids really knew what to do with Shrinky Dinks once they were shrunky dunk. One can only have so many zipper pulls, key chains, and napkin rings, after all. But no one ever thought about that when they were watching the plastic writhe in its little kitchen torture chamber. Sometimes the journey is indeed way more fun than the destination.

X-TINCTION RATING: Still going strong.

FUN FACT: In the 1970s, superheroes were the bestselling Shrinky Dinks theme; in the 1980s, it was the Smurfs. 

And indeed, in 2021, Shrinky Dinks are still out there, making kids ask themselves: What shall I create? And why is the oven door so grungy? Can't see nothin'!

As I noted, the book covers all sorts of cultural items, like typing classes, Bicentennial mania, Roosevelt Franklin, Jolt Cola, Halloween costumes "with unbreathable plastic masks," killer animal movies, Judy Blume books, and Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo. If you were alive and aware in the United States in the two decades covered, there's some cultural resonance for you in this book.

The authors have since moved on with their careers. They did a sequel book about the nineties, which looks like fun, but the original Web site for the project has been allowed to turn into a cobweb. I guess my looking back at this book that looks back at the past is like being nostalgic for Happy Days ("Fascination with the 1950s" is an entry in the book as well, by the way). 

And say -- before I close this entry, whatever DID happen to Jell-O Pudding Pops? Well, despite their popularity in the eighties, thanks to pitchman Bill Cosby (whose life went in the toilet after this book was published), the company had trouble making a profit from them. Then, "the Jell-O name was later licensed to Popsicle, which reintroduced the Jell-O Pudding Pops in 2004. Sadly, sharp-eyed eaters say its just not the same." And have since been discontinued. 

Well, sic transit Jell-O Pop mundi, I guess.  

Fred's Book Club: Cheeky Devil!

Well, hello there! You must like to read, huh? You're doing it right now! And you're in the right place for our book feature, the Wednesday "Hump Day" feature we call the Humpback Writers, although nary a hump remains to be found. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter!

Today's novel is an unusual bird, a surreal comedy from 1943 that is still hilarious. You know the author best (if at all) as writer and creator of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. But before he wrote the Dobie Gillis stories that became a movie and later a TV show, he wrote this, his first book:

Max Shulman took the title from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem that every schoolchild would have known back then, left off the "of tan," and pegged it to his novel about a dumbbell named Asa Hearthrug and his freshman year at Shulman's alma mater, the University of Minnesota. Calling this book a novel is kind of a stretch; it is a book-long comedy of the college scene, unsurprising since Shulman made his name as a humorist in college. 

You get the feel for how the book is going to go straight off the front matter, in the Author's Note: 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. The University of Minnesota is, of course, wholly imaginary. I think it would be of some interest to the reader to know how I happened to pick the name "Minnesota."
     It is a combination of two Indian words -- "Minne" meaning a place where four spavined men and a minor woman ate underdone pemmican, and "sota" meaning the day the bison got away because the hunter's wife blunted his arrows in a fit of pique.
     The combination of the two words means little, if anything, but the reader must consider that they are the only two Indian words I know. 

And we're off to the races.

Our book opens as Asa says farewell to his parents before his sojourn at the university. He also must bid a touching good-bye to his sweetheart, Lodestone La Toole:

Then I was beside her, and my funny little crooked smile gleamed across my bronzed face, and my brooding gray eyes crinkled at the corners. "Lodestone," I said simply.

     "Asa," she breathed, for that was my name.

     She was in my arms. Our lips met. Time crashed wildly about us as the entire universe was resolved into our wild embrace. I was laved in the fragrance of her. I knew a pulsing, mounting ecstasy, Then suddenly I was still, at peace in a pastel world. 

     "I'm hungry," said Lodestone at length. "Can't we get something to eat?"

     "Not now, my own. I haven't time. I must leave you in oh, too short a time to go to the University of Minnesota."

     "Maybe we could just get a hamburger. That don't take long."

     "I am going," I continued, "and yet I am not going. For you will always be with me. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I shall always think of you."

     "There's a White Castle down the road a piece. They have real nice hamburgers. It don't take them hardly no time to fix them neither."

Alas, soon our Asa is in college, and before you know it, swept into the Alpha Cholera fraternity, confused by professors, and prey to a femme fatale.    

I felt a prod in my ribs. Turning, I saw a dark-eyed, finely mustached girl in a close-knit burlap dress. "Hey," she whispered, "you know what sociology is?"

     "The study of how people live together," I answered.

     "Nah," she said. "It's the study of how the working class is oppressed under the capitalistic system."

     The professor fixed us with a baleful eye. "If you two don't mind," he said, "I'll go on with my lecture."

     "Tool," hissed the girl.

Yes, this is a member of the students communist party, Yetta Samovar. Or so she calls herself, having taken the name from a hero of the Soviet workers' paradise.

"She was the first Soviet woman to operate a power crane," said Yetta. "One day while working at the Dnepropetrovsk dam she leaned out of her crane to wave a greeting to a young man whose bed she shared and with whom she had become quite friendly. She leaned too far. Down she plunged into a block of newly laid, quick-drying concrete. Her last words as the concrete hardened around her were, 'Solidarity forever!'"

Asa's fraternity brothers struggle to save him from the grip of the communists by setting him up with another woman, named Noblesse Oblige. Asa falls in love with both. But what of sweet and hungry Lodestone La Toole? How will Asa decide? 

Asa is also put forward by his Cholera brothers to run for freshman representative to the student council -- can he win? What about the student newspaper? Why are they yelling all the time? ("Tear out the front page! I just got the results of the intramural chess matches.") 

It's a fast read and very funny, and while time has changed college culture to be even worse than it was in 1943, rest assured that it should all be recognizable to a student in any era.

I have to confess that the copy pictured above is not mine; mine is a 1948 three-in-one edition that I got from the Strand for $4 (price tag still inside). The collection includes Barefoot Boy, World War II home-front sendup The Feather Merchants, and the further adventures of Asa Hearthrug in The Zebra Derby.

I just want to mention one more gag, this from The Zebra Derby, in which Asa goes to war. In that book we find out that Asa's father is named Max Hearthrug. Max Shulman includes this footnote:

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

And sure enough, in the course of The Zebra Derby we meet Max Pilfering, Max Onus, Max Clodde, Max Nipthung, Max Stagecraft, etc. etc.... and the return of Yetta Samovar! 

With jokes like these, you should read something else?

Fred's Book Club: At the Plate.

It's Wednesday, friends, and that means another dose of the Humpback Writers, our Hump Day book feature. Get it? Hump Day, Humpback? No? Me neither. 

Anyway, it's also the day before baseball's Opening Day, and with that we have another baseball book, and another brief tale of Fred from when he had a career. Yes, today we have a book from National Geographic and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a children's book that is as American as anything American can be. 

And I couldn't get to Ralph Kiner for an autograph. The local TV crews were all over him. 

America at Bat: Baseball Stuff & Stories came out of a national tour, and the tour came from the love for our nation in the wake of the dastardly attacks of September 11, 2001. The Hall of Fame and its partners decided to put together a tour of sensational baseball memorabilia from the museum, a tour that would launch with an appearance by dozens of Hall of Famers. It began in New York City in March 2002, and traveled as a museum installation for six years, finishing in Boston in September 2008. It was called Baseball As America. 

At the time of the launch I was working for a magazine in midtown, and was one of the only people on staff who was a fan of baseball, or any sport other than backbiting. So when the features editor got an invitation to the launch party at the American Museum of Natural History, she kindly asked if I wanted to go. Did I!

I could not have imagined being in a room with so many baseball superstars at once. Kiner was there, and Hank Aaron, and Warren Spahn, and Bob Feller, and 22 others, and somewhere I had a notebook and press info with everyone's names but that has been lost to time. 

Out of the tour came a commemorative book for adults, but I wasn't given a copy of that. I got the kids' book, written by Paul Rosenthal, with an introduction by Aaron, from which these pages come. It's a great little book, full of amazing baseball pictures, stories, trivia, and photos of objects from the Hall of Fame's museum that were on the tour. Tour items included a replica of Ruth's bat you could pick up, FDR's "green light" letter to Commissioner Landis recommending baseball continue during World War II, and of course ancient equipment, priceless uniforms and cards, and an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Tom Seaver. 

I thought then and think now that it was a nice thing for the Hall of Fame to do, and a reminder that sports could really bring people of all backgrounds together. 

Of course, in recent years, sports, like everything else, is being used to tear us apart instead. Which is why I can be sentimental about this sentimental book -- baseball was a light in a dark hour in New York City in the year after 9/11. I wish Major League Baseball and the other pro sports leagues felt that way now. Instead they seem to hate America as much as our foreign enemies do, and then wonder why Americans are tuning out. But I'll probably be watching some games this year, at least until the newly configured Mets fall prey to injuries and stupidity, as usual. 

Fred's Book Club: Ante Up!

Greetings and salutations, and welcome back to our Humpback Writers feature, the Wednesday book feature that asks the musical question, "Why Humpback?" And gives the musical answer, "Because it falls on Hump Day and we thought it was funny at the time."

We've profiled every kind of book on this blog from blank marble notebooks to an encyclopedia, but I don't think we've covered an actual book of rules. Well, if you had that on your bingo card, mark it off!

If you're old enough you may recall people using the phrase "according to Hoyle," and not just in terms of card games. It was another way of saying "this is kosher" or "that's the way I heard it" or other expressions that denote correctness. So who was this Hoyle anyway, and who made him the boss of us?

Edmond Hoyle was a good card player in eighteenth-century London; good enough that he taught upper-class types how to play whist. He published the rules for the game and a treatise on the play, which sold out. Later he wrote books on other card games, backgammon, chess, and even probability theory, which shows he had a keen mathematical mind. Also, a keen marketing mind, since he fought off pirated versions of his books by making his name the one to look for. 

At this late date, the name Hoyle is like the name Webster, in that anyone can use it and it doesn't mean much. Those looking for authenticity in card games and dictionaries need to see editions of Hoyle's older books that have been written and updated in a line of his followers, like Apostolic Succession, and for Merriam-Webster, which company is the true descendent of Nathaniel Webster's. So is my little paperback, er, according to Hoyle?

I think so, or as close as I could get. The title page says it is "Based on the Foundations laid down by Edmond Hoyle," for what that's worth. The first printing of this edition goes back to 1946, which is not a surprise based on the illustrations. 

People in 1946 dressed better to travel by train
than we do now to be buried.

If you want an older version of the book, Mongo and our other friends at Gutenberg have Hoyle's Games Modernized by Professor Hoffmann and Edmond Hoyle, available for free here.

My little paperback is useful, if you want to have the rules handy. If you and your friends enjoy card games, it's best to have one source upon which you can agree. In 255 pages my book has rules for all kinds of card games, as well as chess, Scrabble, dominoes, and so on. They're all very terse and to the point; all forms of Bridge, rules and strategies, are spelled out in 33 pages, but from what I am told, Bridge is also spelled out in a lifetime of frustration and arguments.  

Now here's the story I wanted to tell about this paperback. 

When I was a young baby editor, in the days of buffering and no smartphones, my wife asked me to pick up a Hoyle book because she liked solitaire and playing card games with others. I occasionally had poker nights, so I could use the book too. There was a Barnes & Noble near my office, and the Friday morning of our company picnic, when no one wanted to do any work, I zipped down there and bought the book. It fit nicely in the pocket of my shorts. I figured I'd bring it home that night rather than leave it in the office until Monday.

Hours later, at the picnic, I sat down in the shade to see some of my coworkers playing cards on a bench. It turned out they were playing Hearts, a game I had played many times. Two of the guys (I'll call them Moe and Larry) were tied as the game progressed. Then on one deal, Larry wound up with what seemed like a disastrous hand, being stuck with all the hearts and the Queen of Spades (the black lady version of the game). Moe gloated, but I said, "He shot the moon." Larry smiled and nodded.

"What?" snapped Moe.

"He shot the moon. If you get all the hearts and the queen of spades, it's shooting the moon. He gets 26 points off his total."

"I NEVER HEARD OF THAT! THAT'S RIDICULOUS!"

"Well, I just happen to have Hoyle's book with me..."

I have never seen anyone's eyes bug out bigger than Moe's did as I put the book on the table. "WHO THE FUCK WALKS AROUND WITH HOYLE'S RULES IN HIS POCKET?"

Everyone else fell over laughing. 

The game pretty much came to an end after that. All I can say is, for all the books I've carried around with me all my life, that was the one memorable time when I happened to have exactly right book at the right time. Thank you, Mr. Hoyle!

Fred's Book Club: Irish Humor, via Chicago.

Welcome back to the Wednesday book feature called the Humpback Writers for no reason we can determine. This year St. Patrick's Day falls on Hump Day, so we are behooved to profile an Irish-themed book for the day, albeit one from a native Chicagoan. And that brings us to Finley Peter Dunne, creator of the irrepressible Mr. Dooley and a Fred fave.

I was willing to spend a fortune on him.

During a hot spell in 2017 I profiled Dunne and his great teller of tales, Mr. Dooley. Dooley is a classic example of a lower class character of long standing, that being a comical retailer of truths who is wiser than the smart set who would look down on him. Dunne, writing at the turn of the last century, chose an Irish gentleman to be his avatar. Other examples might include Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, Mike Royko's Slats Grobnik, and basically Will Rogers's entire career. 

My 1963 paperback, which may have passed through many hands until it came into mine, contains essays on such topics as the youthful President Teddy Roosevelt, the benefits of hanging aldermen, international affairs, and women's suffrage. The hardest part of reading Dunne's work is to know what the issues of the time were; the second hardest is to get in the rhythm of the Irish dialect as portrayed on paper. If you know a little American history and have been able to get through Mark Twain, you'll be all right with Mr. Dooley. 

I can find no better way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day literarily than presenting one of the essays from the book -- which can also be found in the collection of Dunne's work on Project Gutenberg, thanks to friend Mongo and those other fine preservers of literature in this age of book-burning. In a time when the police are indicted and violent felons turned loose, I thought it would be good to hear from Mr. Dooley...

ON CRIMINALS.

"Lord bless my sowl," said Mr. Dooley, "childher is a gr-reat risponsibility,—agr-reat risponsibility. Whin I think iv it, I praise th' saints I niver was married, though I had opporchunities enough whin I was a young man; an' even now I have to wear me hat low whin I go down be Cologne Sthreet on account iv th' Widow Grogan. Jawn, that woman'll take me dead or alive. I wake up in a col' chill in th' middle iv th' night, dhreamin' iv her havin' me in her clutches.

"But that's not here or there, avick. I was r-readin' in th' pa-apers iv a lad be th' name iv Scanlan bein' sint down th' short r-road f'r near a lifetime; an' I minded th' first time I iver see him,—a bit iv a curly-haired boy that played tag around me place, an' 'd sing 'Blest Saint Joseph' with a smile on his face like an angel's. Who'll tell what makes wan man a thief an' another man a saint? I dinnaw. This here boy's father wur-rked fr'm morn till night in th' mills, was at early mass Sundah mornin' befure th' alkalis lit th' candles, an' niver knowed a month whin he failed his jooty. An' his mother was a sweet-faced little woman, though fr'm th' County Kerry, that nursed th' sick an' waked th' dead, an' niver had a hard thought in her simple mind f'r anny iv Gawd's creatures. Poor sowl, she's dead now. May she rest in peace!

"He didn't git th' shtreak fr'm his father or fr'm his mother. His brothers an' sisters was as fine a lot as iver lived. But this la-ad Petey Scanlan growed up fr'm bein' a curly-haired angel f'r to be th' toughest villyun in th' r-road. What was it at all, at all? Sometimes I think they'se poison in th' life iv a big city. Th' flowers won't grow here no more thin they wud in a tannery, an' th' bur-rds have no song; an' th' childher iv dacint men an' women come up hard in th' mouth an' with their hands raised again their kind.

"Th' la-ad was th' scoorge iv th' polis. He was as quick as a cat an' as fierce as a tiger, an' I well raymimber him havin' laid out big Kelly that used to thravel this post,—'Whistlin'' Kelly that kep' us awake with imitations iv a mockin' bur-rd,—I well raymimber him scuttlin' up th' alley with a score iv polismin laborin' afther him, thryin' f'r a shot at him as he wint around th' bar-rns or undher th' thrucks. He slep' in th' coal-sheds afther that until th' poor ol' man cud square it with th' loot. But, whin he come out, ye cud see how his face had hardened an' his ways changed. He was as silent as an animal, with a sideways manner that watched ivrything. Right here in this place I seen him stand f'r a quarther iv an' hour, not seemin' to hear a dhrunk man abusin' him, an' thin lep out like a snake. We had to pry him loose.

"Th' ol' folks done th' best they cud with him. They hauled him out iv station an' jail an' bridewell. Wanst in a long while they'd dhrag him off to church with his head down: that was always afther he'd been sloughed up f'r wan thing or another. Between times th' polis give him his own side iv th' sthreet, an' on'y took him whin his back was tur-rned. Thin he'd go in the wagon with a mountain iv thim on top iv him, sway in' an' swearin' an' sthrikin' each other in their hurry to put him to sleep with their clubs.

"I mind well th' time he was first took to be settled f'r good. I heerd a noise in th' ya-ard, an' thin he come through th' place with his face dead gray an' his lips just a turn grayer. 'Where ar-re ye goin', Petey?' says I. 'I was jus' takin' a short cut home,' he says. In three minyits th' r-road was full iv polismin. They'd been a robbery down in Halsted Sthreet. A man that had a grocery sthore was stuck up, an' whin he fought was clubbed near to death; an' they'd r-run Scanlan through th' alleys to his father's house. That was as far as they'd go. They was enough iv thim to've kicked down th' little cottage with their heavy boots, but they knew he was standin' behind th' dure with th' big gun in his hand; an', though they was manny a good lad there, they was none that cared f'r that short odds.

"They talked an' palavered outside, an' telephoned th' chief iv polis, an' more pathrol wagons come up. Some was f'r settin' fire to th' buildin', but no wan moved ahead. Thin th' fr-ront dure opened, an' who shud come out but th' little mother. She was thin an' pale, an' she had her apron in her hands, pluckin' at it. 'Gintlemin,' she says, 'what is it ye want iv me?' she says. 'Liftinant Cassidy,' she says, ''tis sthrange f'r ye that I've knowed so long to make scandal iv me before me neighbors,' she says. 'Mrs. Scanlan,' says he, 'we want th' boy. I'm sorry, ma'am, but he's mixed up in a bad scrape, an' we must have him,' he says. She made a curtsy to thim, an' wint indures. 'Twas less than a minyit before she come out, clingin' to th' la-ad's ar-rm. 'He'll go,' she says. 'Thanks be, though he's wild, they'se no crime on his head. Is there, dear?' 'No,' says he, like th' game kid he is. Wan iv th' polismin stharted to take hold iv him, but th' la-ad pushed him back; an' he wint to th' wagon on his mother's ar-rm."

"And was he really innocent?" Mr. McKenna asked.

"No," said Mr. Dooley. "But she niver knowed it. Th' ol' man come home an' found her: she was settin' in a big chair with her apron in her hands an th' picture iv th' la-ad in her lap."

Fred's Book Club: Mine, Mine, Mine!

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen and book lovers of all ages! This week on the Hump Day book feature known as the Humpback Writers (get it? ha ha) we have a classic adventure novel, one of the world's most famous, a novel that has set the tone for hundreds of imitators on page and screen, and so is likely to be shoved down the memory hole as soon as someone under age thirty realizes it ever existed. 

H. Rider Haggard was a classic Brit of his time, who spent years working in Britain's African colonies before beginning a career as a writer of adventure fiction. King Solomon's Mines, published in 1885, introduced his famous hero, hunter, and adventurer Allan Quatermain to the world. I think the words "hunter" and "colonies" are enough to explain why Haggard will one day be on the SJW chopping block.

But he shouldn't be. King Solomon's Mines is an extraordinary adventure, and a great yarn. It begins with Quatermain, who meets with one Sir Henry Curtis and a Captain Good. Sir Henry has been looking for his brother, who has gone missing in a supposed quest for the titular treasure. Quatermain has some information on that from a man he met named José Silvestre, and he shares the story:

“Then he groped in his shirt and brought out what I thought was a Boer tobacco pouch made of the skin of the Swart-vet-pens or sable antelope. It was fastened with a little strip of hide, what we call a rimpi, and this he tried to loose, but could not. He handed it to me. ‘Untie it,’ he said. I did so, and extracted a bit of torn yellow linen on which something was written in rusty letters. Inside this rag was a paper.

“Then he went on feebly, for he was growing weak: ‘The paper has all that is on the linen. It took me years to read. Listen: my ancestor, a political refugee from Lisbon, and one of the first Portuguese who landed on these shores, wrote that when he was dying on those mountains which no white foot ever pressed before or since. His name was José da Silvestra, and he lived three hundred years ago. His slave, who waited for him on this side of the mountains, found him dead, and brought the writing home to Delagoa. It has been in the family ever since, but none have cared to read it, till at last I did. And I have lost my life over it, but another may succeed, and become the richest man in the world—the richest man in the world. Only give it to no one, señor; go yourself!’

“Then he began to wander again, and in an hour it was all over.

“God rest him! he died very quietly, and I buried him deep, with big boulders on his breast; so I do not think that the jackals can have dug him up. And then I came away.”

“Ay, but the document?” said Sir Henry, in a tone of deep interest.

“Yes, the document; what was in it?” added the captain.

“Well, gentlemen, if you like I will tell you. I have never showed it to anybody yet except to a drunken old Portuguese trader who translated it for me, and had forgotten all about it by the next morning. The original rag is at my home in Durban, together with poor Dom José’s translation, but I have the English rendering in my pocket-book, and a facsimile of the map, if it can be called a map. Here it is.”

The map, of course, supposedly can lead one to the fabled mines of King Solomon himself, source of endless diamonds -- if one can survive. They arrange an expedition, one that requires crossing a desert. In the biggest gut-check I think I've ever seen in fiction, the expedition realizes that if the one source of water shown on the 300-year-old map is not active, or not there, or not exactly where the poor map says it will be, they will be doomed to a horrible death; they cannot carry enough water to make a round trip. And they are aware that no known expedition has ever survive this quest. 

People looking for racism in the book will find it easily enough. Some natives behave strangely when Captain Good removes his false teeth -- which to the isolated people would be like me seeing a guy pull off his head: 

“What does that beggar say?” asked Good.

“He says we are going to be killed,” I answered grimly.

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Good; and, as was his way when perplexed, he put his hand to his false teeth, dragging the top set down and allowing them to fly back to his jaw with a snap. It was a most fortunate move, for next second the dignified crowd of Kukuanas uttered a simultaneous yell of horror, and bolted back some yards.

“What’s up?” said I.

“It’s his teeth,” whispered Sir Henry excitedly. “He moved them. Take them out, Good, take them out!”

He obeyed, slipping the set into the sleeve of his flannel shirt.

In another second curiosity had overcome fear, and the men advanced slowly. Apparently they had now forgotten their amiable intention of killing us.

But the most determined, courageous, and clever character in the book is a black African. Moreover, Quatermain is tired of hunting, sick of the damage being done to his beloved Africa. So if you ask me, Haggard was well ahead of his time in many regards. 

The story leads to a tremendous battle scene, and boy oh boy does it look in my mind's eye like a classic Hollywood cast-of-thousands fight. And of course, there's a death-defying descent into the earth to find the treasures concealed within. 

I say, if you want a taste of old-fashioned thrills and chills, you can hardly do better than King Solomon's Mines, unless it's one of Haggard's other novels, like She or Ayesha. I read this Dover edition, but you can check it out for free thanks to Mongo and our other friends at Project Gutenberg. The book is foundational for the "Lost World" type of story, and set a blueprint for high adventure that persisted for a hundred years. 

Fred's Book Club: Right on the Pea Stain.

Greetings and salutations on this Hump Day, my friends, as we dive into another book in the Humpback Writers feature. Do the writers actually have hunched backs? Not that I'm aware of. We just went with the Humpback theme for Hump Day and now we regret it. Still, if you know of any writers who suffer from kyphosis, or are actual humpback whales, please alert me. 

This week's book celebrates the wonderful inability of people to understand the mumbling and bumbling of modern singers, or just the inability of people to listen properly to anything. Yes, we are discussing mondegreens. Webster's defines the mondegreen as "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung," which comes "from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'." And this book will convince you that people are very poor earwitnesses.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: And Other Misheard Lyrics is a fine collection of comically misheard words by author Gavin Edwards, who began collecting them for a piece in the now-defunct Details magazine. The title of our blog entry today comes from a mishearing of Cat Stevens's "Ride on the Peace Train." 

In the introduction to the book, Edwards writes, mondegreens "tend to be about primal concerns: food, sex, animals. Any misheard lyric is an impromptu audio Rorschach test. It can be alarming to discover that significant parts of our brains want pop songs to cover the lyrical topics of cheese, walruses, and clowns." He swears that all the mondegreens in this book are genuine, in that people really reported believing these were the actual lyrics of well-known songs.

Here are some classics from the pages, illustrated by collaborator Chris Kalb, with the correct lyric below:

Others that I'm sure you can guess include "Slow-Motion Walter, fire-engine guy" (Deep Purple), "Mice aroma" (the Knack), "Clown Control to Mao Tse-Tung" (David Bowie), and "Everybody's got a hungry horse" (Bruce Springsteen). 

Gavin Edwards has written many other books, including three more collections of mondegreens: He's Got the Whole World in His Pants, When a Man Loves a Walnut, and the inevitable Christmas collection, Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly. We applaud Edwards for helping popularize the idea of mondegreens, and promoting some classic examples with his writing. It's a true cultural contribution. 

Or, as the band Hot Chocolate once sang, at least according to this book, "I believe in milk and cows." And who can argue with that?

Fred's Book Club: Prophet Margin.

Welcome back, my friends, to the Hump Day feature that never ends! Yes, it's the Humpback Writers, our feature with the stupid name that runs on Wednesday. We try to get a wide variety of books here in the book club, sometimes seasonal, and this one is pegged to the start of baseball's spring training games on Sunday. 

Prophet of the Sandlots: Journeys with a Major League Scout is a book every fan of baseball ought to read, especially one interested in the history of the leagues and how they recruit players. Author Mark Winegardner traveled with Tony Lucadello, an elderly scout for the Cubs and the Phillies, who signed up 49 major leaguers in his career, including Mike Schmidt and Fergie Jenkins. Well, he signed hundreds of players, but 49 made it to the Show. This book is the story of Lucadello and Winegardner's scouting trips through the Midwest in 1988.

Lucadello was 75 when they made that trek, and even in 1988 was a dinosaur in the world of baseball. He drove around the country, visiting, revisiting, and re-revisiting prospects from the time they were kids until they were old enough to sign. Initially he could sign up any player he thought had potential. But that changed in 1965.

Tony claimed he'd never said a swear word, but if he ever slipped, he must have used the same inflection as when he says "draft." Before 1965, when major league baseball instituted the draft, if Tony found a player he liked, he could offer him a contract on the spot.... Since 1965, though, the only way Tony can sign a player he likes is by convincing the Phillies to draft that player. 

Tony's method, seen many times in the book, was the cultivation of relationships, expecting that when the time came for the boy to sign, he'd sign with the man who had been so encouraging as he grew up. 

"Tony is different," said [Phillies scouting director Jack] Pastore, who's known the old scout almost twenty-five years. "He's like a gardener; he cultivates his players. He takes an interest in them at a younger age, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. And he keeps in touch, maybe by sending a Christmas card, and he really gets close to the player and the family, probably closer than most scouts today. You know, most scouts would just say, 'Well, the kid's going to get drafted. What's my chance of getting him?' They can find twenty reasons why not to, but Tony takes the one positive reason and he does it the other way. If we draft one of Tony's players, the negotiations are a lot smoother, the probability of signing that player is a lot better, because the families appreciate that personal touch." 

But he didn't just leave young prospects with a handshake; Tony Lucadello also left a plan for the boy and his people to develop his abilities. One method was the wall, his baseball-themed answer to all the basketball hoops in Midwest driveways, which encouraged throwing and fielding skills:

Tony watched Jason throw about fifty balls off the wall. Tony has a scout pose: hands thrust deep into overcoat pockets, hat brim tilting forward, head nodding, face impassive. That blank poker face is a master scout's stock-in-trade, developed over the years to prevent lesser scouts from learning what ball players Tony likes and then going after them. Tony has had so many prospects stolen out from under him that he has not only perfected the poker face but also scouted in secret, concealed in his car or behind telephone poles or on rooftops or even -- at the age of sixty-eight -- from the top of a loblolly pine.

Another method Tony recommended to youngsters involved plastic golf balls, having someone throw them for the prospect to hit. The tiny ball developed the eye; and it could be practiced indoors, as the author discovered, pitching to a prospect at Wright State University. 

Lucadello could be a little underhanded himself, faking tears with onion juice in one well-told incident to use emotion to get a prospect signed. But the fact that other people (including a prospect) that Winegardner spoke to in the book had heard the story from Tony shows that the old scout was willing to tell that one on himself. 

The is a terrific profile of an American original, the kind of hardworking scout one always expects to see on the back roads of the nation but won't find anymore. It's a great book, with wonderful baseball stories and an interesting look at the lives of young baseball dreamers. 

Lucadello did not find a way into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but his personal papers were donated to the hall's library, which shows a modicum of the respect he'd garnered in his long career. 

Fred's Book Club: Oh So Bad.

Greetings, book lovers, and welcome to the Humpback Writers, our Wednesday (Hump Day) book feature -- this week, the Ash Wednesday book feature. No actual humps have yet been detected, but that doesn't mean our authors are all beauty pageant contestants, let me tell you.

Since it is Ash Wednesday, I considered profiling a book of great theological wisdom, humility, penance, and historical importance, like The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. But I decided to go the other way.

Sinner is a sort of book of confession by Lino Rulli, host of The Catholic Guy Show on SiriusXM radio's Catholic Channel. When I say it's a book of confession, I mean like Confessions by St. Augustine, except nothing at all like that. Well, maybe a little. It's just that Lino is nothing at all like that. Maybe he's akin to St. Augustine as he tries to live a Christian life, but like all of us he doesn't quite pass the Augustine bar. In fact, he rarely passes any bars. (Rimshot.) 

From the introduction, Lino discusses his intentions:

Having me write a book about the Catholic faith is like having a really bad actor write a book about the craft of acting. (Speaking of which, why hasn't Pauly Shore written a book about acting yet?)

The only way I could wrap my head around writing this book was if I called it Sinner, because that sums me up.

And I knew I had come up with the right name when not one person disagreed with it. If I called it The Catholic Guy's Path to Sainthood or Holy Lino's Guide to God, there would have been protests in the street and the burning of my image in effigy.

But everyone seemed to agree on one thing: I'm a sinner. 

Lino's youth, as the only child of one and a half devout Catholics, was not particularly ordinary. One day while praying in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel at St. Peter's Basilica on a family trip to Rome, his father (the half-devout one) felt God was telling him to leave his career as a parole officer to become... an organ grinder. Of course, every organ grinder needs a monkey:

My dad sat me down to explain. "Lino, we can't get a monkey. First off, we can barely take care of the two cats in the house. Second, there's no room for a monkey around here. And third, we can't afford it. The insurance is too expensive. He could bite someone, they'd sue us, and we'd be stuck." 

This all sounded like common sense. And I couldn't help but wonder if there were any other father-son conversations taking place on the planet at that moment about why the family couldn't get a monkey.

"OK, Pops," I said, thinking he just needed to get this information off his chest. As I got up to go, he stopped me.

"Since we can't get a real monkey..." There was a pause. Maybe he wanted me to figure it out on my own. Maybe his conscience was getting the better of him.

"I need you to dress up like a monkey and ask for money."

He got up and left the room, but walked back in with one more thought.

"Oh, and don't bite anyone or we'll get sued."

And with that, I became a monkey boy.

Lest you think he's making it up, there is a picture in the book of Monkey Lino, Pops, and the organ.

So we are entertained by stories of his eccentric Midwestern youth, his quest for a Mrs. Lino, and his tortuous career path. But you may be wondering if Lino ever gets around to the Catholicism stuff. And he does, quite a bit. He is a big fan of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, known colloquially as Confession, and he has some advice on the topic:

Welcome to the least reverent guide to confession you'll ever read.

After you've committed to the idea of going to confession, you've got to figure out which lucky priest will hear your sins. If you find a parish that has confession by appointment only, move on to the next parish. A parish of three thousand people that offers confession on Saturday from 4:00 to 4:05 might not be where you want to pour out your soul, either. Find yourself a parish that offers confession frequently. Daily is preferable.

Advent or penance services are a great opportunity, but make sure it actually involves going to confession. Don't be fooled by those "communal penance" services that involve thinking about sins but not saying them out loud. That's not confession, that's reminiscing.  

Around the time this book came out, I was driving to Westchester for work every day. My wife got me a subscription to Sirius, which is how I discovered The Catholic Guy Show. Eventually I had to start going into the city by bus, so I dropped the service, but I still sometimes catch the podcast version of the show, especially if I know I'll be in the car more than usual. It's entertaining. Since Lino wrote Sinner, he did find a wife and moved back to his native Minneapolis (he had been doing the show from Manhattan), so he's got a whole different set of things to complain about now than he used to. 

If you're Catholic, you'll probably find the book funny. Amusing for anyone, really. 

For a Catholic guy who hosts a show called The Catholic Guy Show, Lino Rulli is not much of a booster for the religion. He spends half his time knocking dull Catholic radio hosts, overzealous Catholics, and others who might be considered part of his fan base. 

But Lino's boss and friend Cardinal Dolan has seldom had to swat him for sinful radio, so he must be doing something good -- sinner though he is.

Fred's Book Club: The Great Man Speaks.

Good day, fine folks, and welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the book feature that falls on Wednesdays, known in some disreputable corners as Hump Day. The writers don't actually have humps, or at least we have not found any, and we've looked. And the subject of today's book was way too tall to have had any bend to the spine -- otherwise his legs might not have been long enough to reach the ground. His birthday is this Friday, February 12.

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America is a remarkable account of Lincoln's most famous speech, given at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery at the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. This book is the first Pulitzer Prize winner I've profiled, because an awful lot of books that win that prestigious prize are lousy, but not this one. Wills's account is a compelling and scholarly lesson in history and oration. It may seem that a speech of 272 words, like the famous address, would hardly remake an afternoon let alone a nation, but Wills makes his case with enormous detail and intriguing historical research.

The book's not long -- 189 pages with another 115 pages of backmatter in my edition -- but it packs a lot in. Wills's comparison of the Gettysburg Address to the orations of Pericles are startling, or were to me. You may admire Lincoln all day without guessing how steeped this autodidact of a president was in classical forms:

The compactness is not merely a matter of length. There is a suppression of particulars in the idealizing art of Lincoln, as in the Greek orations. This restraint produces the aesthetic paradox that makes these works oddly moving despite their impersonal air. The Greek orator does not refer to himself except as answering the city's ordinance. Most often, he uses the plural "we" (hemeis) of all the citizenry -- as Lincoln does. Nor are the Greek dead referred to by name (except in one late example). The fallen are usually just "these (men)" (hoide) -- as Lincoln speaks of "what they did here" or of "these dead." The Epitaphios, as Loraux puts it, is "an oration that ignores individuals." Restraint deepens passion by refusing to give it easy vent.

As Wills points out, Lincoln's address doesn't mention slavery, or even Gettysburg by name. There's no mention of the Confederacy or a reference to the enemy combatants.    

Part of the perfection of Lincoln's prose is his use of reversals, which sets a pattern of birth-death-rebirth. 

The survivors at Gettysburg draw life from death, as their forefathers had sown life in the earth of this continent. The survivors take "increased devotion," even though the fallen men gave "the last full measure of devotion." The increase is not only over what the survivors felt before; it is something that goes beyond the ultimate of what the fallen gave. 

It's a beautiful examination of Lincoln's text, which in subsequent chapters Wills shows in context of the "culture of death" throughout the West at the time. Later he makes his case that this address, more than any other Lincoln speech, sets the tone for a new federal-centered vision of the nation rather than the states-centered vision that led to this war. Here I suspect the liberal Wills oversells -- not that the Civil War did not lead to greater federal prominence, but that the address was of a piece with Lincoln's entire career, and can't carry the whole weight on its own.

For me, one of the best things about the book was its serious examination of a lot of myths about the speech. Lincoln did not wing it; he did not write it on the back of an envelope, or on the train from Washington. Lincoln worked hard on his remarks, and may have consulted Secretary of State William Seward on them the night before the ceremony. Seward had helped him with the First Inaugural. 

Further, the audience didn't get furious because Lincoln's speech was so short. Lincoln was not supposed to be the principal speaker of the day -- former secretary of state Edward Everett, president of Harvard, considered one of the finest speakers of the time, had that honor, and he spoke for more than two hours. I'd have been grateful if the next speaker was brief after that.

I was amazed to discover that Abraham Lincoln did not have a rich, earthy, sonorous voice like that of Almighty God, or at least Raymond Massey, as his height and mournful face would suggest. Actually:

Everett's voice was sweet and expertly moderated; Lincoln's was high to the point of shrillness, and his Kentucky accent offended some Eastern sensibilities. But Lincoln derived an advantage from his high tenor voice -- carrying power. If there is an agreement on any one aspect of Lincoln's delivery, at Gettysburg and elsewhere, it is his audibility. 

We'll end here with the Gettysburg Address itself, and let you read it through in honor of our great president's birthday this week. And as you do, remember that this is the man that is not considered good enough for the sneering jackals who run San Francisco's public schools.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow-- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Fred's Book Club: None the Wurst.

Welcome to Wednesday! That means it's Hump Day, and time for another entry in our Humpback Writers feature. Sometimes they are Humpback Artists as well, but in either case they don't actually have hunched backs. Well, not in today's case, although I am certain our featured writer drew camels at some point. Close enough! 

Wallace Tripp's Wurst Seller is a book of cartoons by Mr. Tripp, who left us in 2018 at the tender age of 78. He's probably best remembered as an illustrator of children's books, including some of the very popular Amelia Bedelia books by Peggy Parish. The above paperback, a brief compendium of art, sketches, fuzzy animals, silly jokes, and horrible puns, was published by Sparhawk Books in 1981. 

I was not surprised to find out that Tripp had lived and worked in England for a time, because there is something English about his sense of humor and his meticulous animal drawings. I hope his estate will not mind my posting some work from this book; how else is one to excerpt it? 

Note that while the term "When you call me that, smile!" does come from the novel The Virginian, the actual author was Owen Wister. Tripp is knowledgeable and expects his audience to be as well. 

I certainly was not, when I came into possession of Wurst Seller. I just loved the gags. This, for example, I enjoyed, but I didn't get the reference: 

It was still funny to me without knowing that the Colombe mentioned at the bottom was Michel Colombe, whose bas relief of St. George was in the Louvre:

And I certainly had no idea that Sandro Botticelli's Primavera, about classical characters and the lust of spring...

... was the inspiration for the bittersweet Tripp "Primavera 1942":

But I should have known something about it, as a sweet aged female relative had told me about being in high school when all the boys had gone off to war. You even see an animal Douglas MacArthur in a jeep on the bottom right, with a trailer of flowers and a sign with the Villon quote, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" (And you see an upside down bunny rabbit on the top left, which -- why not?)

What I mostly liked in the book back then were the silly drawings that pepper the pages, generally featuring animals:

So I thank you, Mr. Tripp, for a very entertaining book, and I hope you will be remembered. It's funny that authors of children's books are often better known than the illustrators, even though the pictures are what usually draw children in. But let us tip the topper to Tripp today, for a job well done.

P.S.: While Wurst Seller has many animals (snakes, skunks, tigers, etc.) and even two Sopwith Camels, there are no camels. Pity -- that would have been as close as we've gotten so far to an actual Humpback Writer.