Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller

I hate to admit that I like internet memes sometimes, but I thought this one needed to be shared: Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller:


More can be found here, or here.

Nancy Drew, via Hark A Vagrant

The ever-awesome webcomic Hark, A Vagrant takes a look at what you can glean from just the covers of Nancy Drew mysteries. I admit, I giggled heartily at almost all of them. There are two pages, so don't miss any:

Grant Poetry: 1880

LITTLE DROPS.

Little Streaks of Lightning, Little
Nubs of News, Make the Sleep-
iest Husband Get up
and Peruse.

Little Canuk Councils, Envy in
Their Wigs, Ostracise Our
Cattle, and Like-
wise Our
Pigs.¹

Little Sailor Alfred Compliments
Our Acts², Oleomargarine is
Liable to Tax³.

Little Mississippi, Has a Small Cy-
clone, Twenty-Two are
Slaughtered; Num-
ber Hurt Un-
known⁴,

And the Little Minutes, Humble tho'
They be, Bring us Near the
Time of President

U. S. G.

(The Argus, 28 April 1880.)

(more...)

Grant Poetry: 1880

MORE BESIDES.

It's Bad Wid Livers Wake and
Woite, but Dennis Kearney
Has 'em¹; He Backed Square
Down in Frisco Town
and Straddled the
Bloody Chasm²

Chicago's Mollies Resoloot, if More
Pigtails They Find, They'll
Murder Every One, and so
They Will, Just in
Their Mind³.

An Indian Scare Up Big Horn Way,
Has Raised the Very Deuce.
The Frightened Folks are
Fleeing to the Valley
of the Goose⁴.

At Fifty Off He Was, You Bet
Our Favorite Maiden Aunt,
His Father Kept a Leather
Shop, His Name Was

U.S. Grant

(The Argus, 17 March 1880.)

(more...)

Grant Poetry: 1880

In 1880, Ulysses S Grant planned for a third presidency; he was very close to being the Republican candidate for the 1880 election, but James A Garfield was chosen instead. Here in Fargo, however, the newspaper The Argus threw their hat into Grant's ring, and expressed their support by composing short poems, with topics taken from the headlines of the day, and culminating in a comment on Grant. Be sure to check the footnotes; they explain the poem's references. I've got a bunch of 'em, I'll share as I transcribe. Yes, the poems were laid out this way:

CHEERFUL.

The Erie Canal has Busted Its

Straps¹—Gladstone Receives a

Knocker²—About a Score off

Scotland's Shore are

Swept to "Jones's

Locker."³

The Dismal Swamp's in Fearful

Blaze⁴—Hatch, Red Men Largely

Collars⁵—The Town of Hull,

Its Loss in Full, is

Several Million

Dollars.⁶

John and Jim, Those Champions

Grim⁷, Believing Their Chances

Scant, Will Come Home Yet,

and Hedge, You Bet;

Wagging Their

Tales For

Grant!

(The Argus, 23 April 1880.)

(more...)

Acquisitions: The Nation's Trashiest Humor

The cover is a bit beat up, and the internal content is all a re-hash of previously published items, but I had to pick this up. The entire title is America The Beautiful: A Collection of the Nation's Trashiest Humor, but there's very little even remotely adult about the comedy therein. This is publication number 2048 of The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, originally published in 1970. The book consists of thirty comics, from the funny pages like B.C., and some from the editorial pages of publications from the New Yorker to Cleveland Plain Dealer, all focusing on the problem of waste disposal. Amusingly, about half have something to do with outer space, especially with moon-men discouraging us from mucking up their home. I won't be able to read my copy in its entirety, though — several pages are torn out, and a few others are stained. Much to the enjoyment of the people who prepared this book, it has not ended up in the trash: I bought it for seventy-five cents at a local thrift shop, one of the best mechanisms to avoid throwing out trash that doesn't need to be trash. I can, amazingly, read the publication in its entirety online at the EPA's website.

Acquisitions: True's Best Cartoons

True magazine was the poor man's Playboy in a sense, containing the lifestyle content without as much sex and nudity, but it was also in its own category by including all kinds of off-the-wall content about UFOs, pirates, deadly animals of all sizes, and a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek. It was in print from the 1930s until the 1970s, but most issues I own or have seen are late 50s to 1960s in vintage. This book, Best Cartoons from True Magazine, came out in 1955, but was reprinted into the 1960s. The book isn't completely cartoons: throughout are short jokes and humorous stories for the more literary readers. I just flipped through a bit, and found that I really don't get a lot of the humor of the time. These aren't Collier's comics, aren't New Yorker comics, and lack that broad interest that makes the comic cross-generational. These look very rooted in their time, and I suppose I'll have to do some research if I decide to read it.

Review: Lover Boy

Check out the artists who created Lover Boy: Stanley and Janice Berenstain. We know them better as Stan and Jan, the creators of the Berenstain Bears. The couple turned to children's books after they had kids of their own, but leading up to it they were part of a group of popular illustrators for mainstream magazines like Collier's. Lover Boy is actually pretty funny, and rather on the fringe in its frank view on sex between couples. First written in 1958, it was a bit ahead of the sexual revolution, so the comic about a guy reading his Playboy, then grabbing his wife lustily, is quite removed from the Leave it to Beaver ideas of how spouses behaved with each other. Today, that Playboy-leads-to-sex comic has probably been used as a subplot in a King of Queens episode, but for the time it was awfully naughty.

Stanley and Janice's couple throughout the book — not necessarily the same couple throughout, but drawn similarly — are obviously a loving couple, but as you might guess from the title, the male psyche is more on trial here. The whole book isn't sex and naughtiness, though: the guy tries a mustache, he meets a talkative woman on the bus and appreciates his wife all the more, he tries home improvements and fails miserably, he tries to put the kids down for a nap. The naughty parts are probably the funniest in their honest humor. The guy isn't a rogue, he isn't cheating on his wife, but he's surrounded by sex all day, at the office, on the street, in movies and at the beach, that he simply can't help but enjoy taking a look whenever he can. The only times it seems the wife storms out or punishes him is when he drinks too much and makes a fool of himself. The wife is the sympathetic one throughout, but she's well aware of what kind of guy she's got, flaws and all. It's no wonder Stan and Jan stayed together for so many years: it's clear, in this early collaboration, that they understood what couples have to put up with.

Acquisitions: Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual

I hope nobody took this seriously, but there's little chance it ever passed as a serious book. Phyllis Diller — who, surprisingly, is still alive & kicking — compiled a bunch of her stand-up punchlines into this book in 1967, at the height of her career. Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual comes with the tagline on the back: "If the last time you smiled was for your wedding photo, this is the book for you." This is for the Wifey's feminism collection: Diller was an early comedienne of the feminine style, and her wife-sympathetic humor has probably driven much of the lazy-lout image of men these days. In flipping through the book, there's a lot of illustrations, done in a style that I initially thought was Gahan Wilson, but is credited to Susan Perl. Maybe if I ever feel the need for a marriage manual, I might have to finally read this; it might not help, but it'll probably make me laugh.

Flame and Fur, Fangs and Wicker

As we've seen, Lyttle-Lytton released their results recently, but so has the Big Boy of these competitions, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Best In Show is nautically-themed as well: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Once a strong and respected genre, the seafaring novel seems to have fallen from favor with the literary illuminati. Or, maybe nautical authors are simply lacking in skill and quality; the lack of opportunities to actually crew a square-rigged ship may mean too much is left to the imagination. I mean, look at this other example I found online: "Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, - aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more - " I mean, who does this "Herman Melville" think he is, writing a book about whaling?

Alas, such dreck isn't acceptable to the Bulwer-Lytton contest; being previously-published, the B-L won't accept it. Both contests are parodies of horrible writing, which — as any parodist will tell you — requires nearly as much talent as being a novelist in entirety. B-L does recognize that horrible writing didn't stop in the 19th century with the original Bulwer-Lytton and that hack Melville: they happily show off some recent examples of the obfuscated and poorly done metaphors.

Briskly, Pants On Her Legs

The Lyttle-Lytton contest for unintentionally-funny literature has released their 2009 results — the winner, it seems, was the nautically-themed "The mighty frigate Indestructible rounded the Horn of Africa and lurched east'ard." Interestingly, at least according to the internet, "east'ard" is an extremely rare word, although it was featured in the title of a 1936 Time magazine story. This, sadly, lends no credibility to the Lyttle-Lytton winner.

Body Writing, Esquire And Others

I'm actually an Esquire subscriber — some free-offer thing — but after the first few issues I was actually rather impressed with the magazine. As you might expect, the most recent cover, which, ahem, seems more Playboy than Esquire, doesn't hurt my opinion of the magazine, either. The feature of the issue is a new short story by Stephen King, and the first few lines are painted on the eye-appealing naked body of supermodel Bar Refaeli:

Beauty of the female form has long been a feature of the covers of magazines (Elle, Cosmopolitan, et al are some of the worst, or best, culprits, frankly). The women's website Lemondrop felt that hot men were rather left out in the deal, so they took their favorite literature and "painted" it on to some hot men. Soccer expert David Beckham, honoring Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?, is some funny stuff right there:

Acquisitions: The Lutefisk Ghetto

The Lutefisk Ghetto, by Art Lee, is still in print (mine is the 10th printing, 1988!), despite being a small press and an obscure title. Since Firefox's spellcheck doesn't understand lutefisk, I better explain: it's a white fish, pickled in lye to make it last longer. When cooked, the lye is drawn out, leaving a jelly-like substance that once was fish. I eat a token amount at Christmas time; Grandpa would eat it for every meal if he could, I'll bet. The book is sub-titled "Life in a Norwegian-American Town," and I suspect it's written in a similar vein to Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion stories, but with a lot more Norwegian. Wifey is enamored with the self-deprecating Norwegian humor, and buys Ole and Lena books all the time, but I grabbed this both because I love local authors and publishers, but it has personal anecdotes from the area culture.

Stealing Books From The Library?!??

I'm not sure what exactly the reference is (Abbie Hoffman?), but even in a non sequitur way, it's funny: I had never thought of a secondary benefit to stealing from a library:
toothpastefordinner.com

"I'm the Editor"

Cute story form the cartoonist behind PvP, about meeting a budding cartoonist. The kid's mom asked the Cartoonist to draw something for her son — he loves comics — but the kid's reaction was proof that he was going in the right direction.

SANTA FEAR!

Ah, Christmas: a time when kids are thrown into a brand new set of social norms that don't apply at all to the rest of the year. Of course they're going to freak out once in a while; we've all seen it happen in the toy section of Wal-Mart, or at the freeway-exit McDonald's on Christmas-Eve-morning, but the place it ends up recorded is Santa's lap. In past years, the Chicago Tribune has been collecting these cheery photos and publishing them online and in the paper, but now that lots of other newspapers have tried their hand at it (I'm posting them at Thingsville as I find them), So, the Tribune editors have taken it big-time and published their own book of the screamy pictures. Buy it for your mom, to take that edge off her rosy memories of your childhood. She'll appreciate it.

George Orwell Writes A Novel

Click the image for the rest of the comic:
By this person (who organizes their blog poorly, hence the jpeg link), found via these people.

Fail: Bookstore Fun

I'm a fan of humorously-captioned photos (I'm an expert at making LOLCats), but it turns out that even a bookstore can fail entertainingly:

Flavorful Old Books

From NatalieDee — Failed Jellybelly Flavors:


Old books are a failed flavor? They were checking with the wrong test group. I've got my fingers crossed for Jones Soda's Librarian 6-Pack of "Old Books", "1980s Xerox Copier", "Vinegaring Film", "Rubber Stamp Ink", and, of course "Hot Librarian".

Re-Buying Books

This article really struck home for me: it's about when you're out browsing used book shops and find the perfect thing you were looking for…but then you get home and find one already on your bookshelf. Here's some examples from our book-buying outings:

Disclaimer: the Anne Roquelaure is not mine. The Complete Cheerful Cherubs, however, are. When I found A Fortune in the Junk Pile last weekend, I conferred with the Wifey because I thought we had it already. Wifey insisted no, but she'd written about it, so I figured I had some wires crossed with her article. Not a week later, I'm cleaning our office, and on the bottom of a stack of books, there it was. I have no idea when we bought it, or why it was in the office and nobody noticed, but we had certainly owned it for at least six months or more. Nigger by Dick Gregory is one that we've had to deliberately stop buying; we know we've got more than one copy of From The Back of the Bus, so we always assume we're missing the N-word one. Wifey and I have consiously told ourselves no more of those…having a shelf of that title might give people the wrong impression. We're not racist; we have poor memories.