She Stoops to Conquer
Oliver Goldsmith, 1773

[A used textbook from 1924, long out of print, from the basement of Left Bank Books -- the book shown is of an edition available on Amazon.]

A classic British comedy of the standard variety: Boy and girl meet and misunderstand each other, while Dad gets angry and Mom, here a merely silly Aunt, makes plans. Oh! will they ever get to marry? Of course, all to be worked out in the final scene. The play is actually still funny. When it was written, the playwright was trying to save England from “sentimental comedy” and create theater in which people would actually laugh. You can tell easily: He includes “Ha-ha-ha” in the dialog about 20 times. This was in an era when people said, in print, such things as “Nothing can authorize a laugh.”

This little 64-page book is remarkable and astonishing. Though I’ve re-read it twice, I’m always shocked at the wealth of information I’ve forgotten — weird, fascinating stuff that you could not possibly predict: ketchup comes from China, and Japanese tempura was really about the locals seeing the Portuguese eating fish at certain times (tempora is “times” in Portuguese), and Kellogg originally was Kill-hog (a hog butcher) and kangaroo meant “I don’t know,” and you wouldn’t believe where he can go with cab and salary and pocket handkerchiefand venom. Even the categories of words in the Table of Contents can stop you: Disorders, Pejoratives, Terms of Multitude, Surprising Family Names, etc. The book is a treasure trove that stays surprising, no matter how many times you read it.

‘1601’

Mark Twain, no date (but probably 1938-39),

Here’s how the entire actual title-page reads, (all centered):

MARK TWAIN’S

[Date, 1601.]

Conversation

As it was by the Social Fireside

in the Time of

the Tudors

Embellished

With an Illuminating Introduction

Facetious Footnotes and a Bibliography

By FRANKLIN J. MEINE

Privately Printed for

LYLE STUART . NEW YORK

An essay on Mark Twain’s underground tale of dirty talk in Elizabethan times in a book of criticism I was reading was the first time I’ve ever seen actual scholarly criticism of that odd little story, so I stopped to re-read it. My copy comes in a slipcase with a big label on it that says, “MARK TWAIN’S DELIGHTFULLY WICKED MASTERPIECE.” A kind of thought-balloon up in the corner says: “AT LAST! NOW YOU CAN READ THIS LONG SUPPRESSED LITERARY CLASSIC!” At the bottom, the label adds, “A SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S LIMITED EDITION.” All of the copy on the slipcase label seems to be true. Around 1876, Mark Twain had been doing research on the speech patterns of earlier English life, and he was intrigued by the much bawdier vocabulary in all classes, in clear contrast to the speech of Victorian life in his own time. As a joke, he wrote a little 8-page pamphlet of conversation between Queen Elizabeth and some courtiers and writers. The bawdy result has two or three dozen of the nastiest words you can think of, and the conversation starts out with some wisecracks about passing gas and then turns to bawdy jokes about prelates and girls. The whole thing really is laugh-out-loud funny in spots — and he wrote it for his best friend: his pastor! While the story uses all the standard “dirty words,” including a few I would never, never use in decent company, he clearly, conspicuously leaves out the king of four-letter English words, the “F” word. My copy includes 60-plus pages of interesting notes on the characters (Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and a few more) and even includes an elaborately detailed printing history of the book.     

All I Want is Everything
Cecily von Ziegasar, Little, Brown, NY, 2003.

The 3^rd volume in the Gossip Girl series, which is is so popular it has already spun off another book series, the It Girl, plus the Gossip Girl TV series, plus knock-offs by other authors, including, so far, The Clique series and the A-List series. The Gossip Girl stories don’t move any faster than a TV soap opera — volume 3 happens just one month after volume 1 — but so what? They’re all about gossip, not progress. Anyway, all these kids are living the logo-life, mostly mindlessly. They seem to be the literary grandchildren of Holden Caulfield, except, of course, they are not dealing with any dead little brothers or nervous breakdowns. They’re more into bulimia and writing bad screenplays to get into Yale, and staying stoned. They are not really to be taken as gritty actual humans. When a 9^th-grader would be getting raped in real life, in these stories an older girl and a brother both show up to save the situation and nobody seems at all bothered, least of all the girl. I’m frankly astounded at these high school seniors who stay drunk and/or stoned almost round the clock, but who can then get naked with each other and yet stay virginal or near-virginal. I know these kids are supposed to be super-cool, but that’s some discipline. It seems all but impossible. Anyway, I think two of these is enough for me, but I can easily picture girls of all ages devouring these things like chips with dip — along with  drinks, of course.

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales

ed. (& some tr.) Maria Tatar, W. W. Norton, NY, 2002.

A big beautiful hardback book, with 450 gorgeously illustrated pages. It seems to be just now coming out, which makes no sense to me, but maybe I missed it for six whole years. I love the Annotated series and buy them whenever I find a new one. I must have six or so, including Mother Goose, Walden, Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland, and Edgar Allan Poe — but I did let Dracula get away. At first, this one bugged me a bit because the illustrations are lined up in a row for inspection, but not in chronological order. Confusing. And some of the thumbnail-size pictures were so small I needed a magnifier to look at them with any care. Also, the editor’s commentary seemed to over-emphasize feminist readings and under-emphasize the details I wanted explained: How long is “twenty-two ells”? When was the first of the famous fe-fi-fo-fums? But she won me over, and her list of key writers, collectors and artist-illustrators at the back of the book is a genuine service. It seems that the “father of the illustrated children’s book” is Walter Crane (1845-1915), and his work looks a lot like the best early newspaper cartoons. My favorite book of his sort is still the earlier and similarly named Classic Fairy Tales, by Opie and Opie, but this new book by Tatar is a keeper, too.