John Belushi Discovered In 1920 Bookplate

by Stephen J. Gertz

Toga! Toga! Toga! Toga!

My goodness, it's John Belushi as Bluto in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), in 1920 masquerading as Dr. Ignatz Streber, Krankenhausarzt (hospitalist).

"Oh no! Seven years of college down the drain!"

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Image courtesy of Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, with our thanks.
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"Wives Is What I Hanker For": Mormons Take Center Stage

by Stephen J. Gertz

We shift from rare prose literature to rare literature of the theater today, inspired by an item offered in Swann Galleries upcoming Vintage  Posters sale, August 7, 2013.

During the 1880-1881 theatrical touring season the Goesche-Hopper Company presented 100 Wives, an anti-Mormon tabloid-theater comedy-melodrama with a dash of anti-Chinese racism that appears to have sold out every performance in every town and city it played in.

The playbill set forth the proceedings:

EMBLEMATIC TABLEAU - Inner Temple of the Mormons. The Danites Receiving a New Covenant. The Solemn Oaths of the Blood atonement. The Chant of the Priests. Immediately following this picture, which illustrates the mission of the Destroying Angels, the curtain rises upon the Play.

ACT I - Salt Lake City. Arrival of the English Colony at New Jerusalem. Elder Bezum's Wicked Designs. The McGinley Family. Elsie Bradford Hears Terrible News. A Timely Rescue.

ACT II - Nick's Ranch at McGinely's Gulch. The Chinese Question. A Boys Celebrate. A Lost Child. The Danites in Pursuit. Bezum Baffled. The Dead Restored To Life.

ACT III - TABLEAU I - McGinley's Home. Reconciliation and New Terrors. Mrs. McGinley's Plan. "Wives is what I hanker for." TABLEAU 2 - Up among the Mines. Little Bessie Prays for her Papa. The Death Fall from the Cliff.

ACT IV - Exterior of the Mormon Tabernacle. The Marriage. Elder Bezum presses Hard. The Mormon Church is Supreme. Surprise. The Govermnet has Something to Say at Last. "Home Sweet Home."

First on the bill, the play's lead character possesses my new favorite name, one right out of S.J. Perelman. Elder Bezum, third on the bill, is the zealous Mormon who declaims, "Wives is what I hanker for." A better headline for a personal ad  would be difficult to compose, "SWMM Seeks Wives! Wives, Wives!" lacking its quaint colloquial fervor.

The Cast:

Confucius McGinley, a Doubtful Convert.
Edward Branford, a Gentile.
Elder Bezum, A Pillar of the Church.
Hung Li, a Celestial.
Mrs. Sophronia McGinley, an Ambitious Woman.
Elsie Bradford, a Deceived Woman.
Mrs. Andrews, a Deluded Woman.
Little Bessie

"If this play could run for a hundred nights instead of closing this week, it would still not exhaust popular interest, for every one who has once seen it must want to go again. It has taken the town by surprise, and that, too, in the midst of election excitement; such a fresh and dramatic story, based on a matter that all are familiar with, yet that for the first time seems to come home to the audience with all its tragic capabilities.

"The popular idea of the 'American play,' with its slang and localisms of manners and dress, is very far indeed from all that is presentd in 'The Hundred Wives.' Nor need any one fear to be introduced into the American harem at Salt Lake, or be treated to any moralizing sermons or situations, in themselves demoralizing and disgusting. On the contrary the plot of this Mormon story is worked out with a hand at once delicate and skilful.

"The believer and the Danite, Mormon Apostle and Destroying Angel, are given just that touch of fanatic devotion and of quaint phraseology as brings out the livery this creed has adopted to serve the devil in, and the opening tableau of the Danite vow in the Mormon Tabernacle is the real keynote to the story. The skill, too, with which the Chinaman is made to foil a Mormon plot is very noticeable, especially as he is a typical Chinaman, of the California pattern, not above the tricks of his tribe - yet turning his secretive qualities to good and loyal effect as the plot thickens.

"Here are the two nearest problems that the American people have to deal with - the Chinese and the Mormon - most ingeniously worked out, and although the audience is in a broad ripple of laughter from beginning to end, there is an undercurrent of appeal constantly that this is a live story, and here is a matter that must be presently be settled in one or another way.

"The entirely novel humor and style of acting of Mr. De Wolf Hopper and Miss Ada Gilman have already been noticed. Both are such natural and such new personations, and both have such unusual physical advantages for the comic situation, that the matrimonial argument is irresistible whenever the diminutive wife takes her tall, strapping miner in hand. Mrs. Sophronia, with her unwavering attachment to the Mormon creed, and her undisguised horror of it when the reality os played off upon her by her own earnestness and her husband's joke, is altogether delightful.

"…In fine, the play is an argument, such as people can understand, against the hideous Mormon creed, which is suffered to exist by virtue of popular indifference to its every-day features. There will certainly be a change in public sentiment wherever the 'Hundred Wives' is played, for it is the one wife that comes out triumphant.

"Forcible as the plot is, it is none the less a clean plot, and all the more dramatic for being a true bill" (The Scrap Book, Volume 2, Sept. 1906- Feb. 1907, pp. 723-724, reprinting a review from the Philadelphia Ledger, 1880).

"This talking drama will occupy the boards at the opera house on Monday night next. The New Orleans Democrat pays the entertainment the following flattering tribute: The new American play, 'One Hundred Wives,' which has created an immense sensation wherever presented, was produced here last night and made a decided hit. The theater was filled from top to bottom, and the unanimous verdict of the immense audience was, that the drama is the best thing in its line which has ever been brought before a New Orleans audience. Though it is somewhat on the order of 'The Danites,' it is far superior to that play both in plot and detail. The company presenting it is an excellent one" (Decatur Review, January 28, 1882).

Producer-Actor De Wolf Hopper (1858-1935), who portrayed Confucius McGinley and was, presumably, the play's writer-director, was ninety-four marriages shy of "100 Wives." Married only six times, his fifth pass at the altar espoused him to actress Elda Furry, who later became the famed Old Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper.

The world awaits a play with clean plot and true bill whose lead character is named Lao Tse McGonagle, Mencius O'Malley, or Zhaozhou Schwartz.

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Images of 100 Wives and De Wolf Hopper courtesy of Swann Galleries; image of 100 Wives flyer courtesy of Ebay, with our thanks.

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The Benny Hill (Or Soupy Sales) of 19th C. British Caricaturists

by Stephen J. Gertz

A Cutlass. (Cut-Lass).

In 1828, a tasty if somewhat groan-inducing gallimaufry of visual wordplay, corniness, and puns in aquatint caricature, Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words, was published by Thomas McLean, the renowned publisher of satirical prints. Very little is known about it. At its time of issue it may have been very popular; word-play, particularly punning, has a long tradition within English folk culture. Though often considered low humor it was a pleasure, innocent or guilty,  across social class. Fun with language is global; even Inuits enjoy its wit.

Taking a Galloway. (Girl away).

A Grenadier. (Granny-dear).

Little is known about Joseph Lisle (fl. 1828-1835), who, based upon a small collection of individual caricatures found in the British Museum, was a satirical designer and lithographer who specialized in visual wordplay and social satire. In addition to Thomas McLean, his work was published by George Hunt, Berthoud & Son, S. Gans, S.W. Fores, Frederick William Collard, Z.T. Purday, S. Maunders, Paine & Hopkins, and Gabriel Shire Tregear. He received notice in Figaro In London (1834, Vols 3-4, p. 139), the forerunner of Punch, for "a clever caricature" regarding the national debt.

In 1828, the same year that he published his Play Upon Words, Joe Lisle created an aquatint for a series, British Classics. The Spectator, published by Berthoud & Son and captioned Very Fond of Prints & a Drawing Master. Within, "A man in quasi-fashionable dress with spurred top-boots and knee-breeches gapes oafishly at a print-shop window, while a little boy, respectably dressed, takes a purse from his breeches-pocket, having already twitched a handkerchief from the coat-tail pocket which hangs inside out" (M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum).

Unlike the aquatints in Play Upon Words, he signed it at lower left ("J. Lisle"). Very Fond of Prints and a Drawing Master shamelessly promotes Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words by featuring it in a double-spread in the center display window at far left.

 The "Drawing Master" of the caption is likely  self-referential. Circa 1830, he drew, etched and  stipple-engraved, and published A Designing Character, with what may be the only image of Lisle we have, a poverty-stricken starving artist.

M. Dorothy George, in the British Museum's Catalogue of British Political And Personal Satires (no. 16413), describes it as "seemingly a self-portrait, a youngish artist in a garret lit by a skylight. He sits in a massive arm-chair under a low slanting roof (right), leaning his head on his right hand, palette and brushes in the left hand. He is neatly dressed and looks with fixed but amiable melancholy through spectacles at the spectator. Easel and canvas are on the left. At his feet is an open portfolio; a tea-pot and bottle are on a rickety stool and on the floor is a frying-pan filled with small coals (sign of great poverty cf. BM Satires No. 14993). A bust on a bracket under the roof is the sole decoration."

A Pioneer. (A pie-on-here).

Here, then, is a collection by a journeyman satirical caricaturist who, if not a peer of his contemporaries Cruikshank, Seymour, Heath, Alken, and Woodward, left a notable mark, however small, in the field.

As to why so little is known and so little produced by Lisle, one can only speculate that he, clearly no stranger to melancholy, was, as so many journeyman artists and writers of his time, perhaps a little too familiar with the play upon livers by ardent spirits.

Misadvised. (Miss-advised).

Whatever the reason for his obscurity he fell through the cracks and Joe Lisle's  Play Upon Words escaped the notice of caricature and color-plate book bibliographers; it is an orphan not found in Abbey, Prideaux, or Tooley. Perhaps it wasn't popular, few copies were printed and fewer survived. Perhaps Lisle's humor was too obvious, the Benny Hill of British caricature, less clever than broad, relying on easy gags rather than sharp social observation, low-brow music hall comedy rather than sly wit. When you have to explain the puns in wink-wink nudge-nudge, Get it?  parenthetical asides you're in trouble.

Americans who were weaned on a certain classic children's show of the '50s through early 1960s will recognize Lisle as a forerunner to comedian Milton Supman (1926-2009), who, performing on U.S. television as Soupy Sales, captured the goofy, simple pleasures of sophomoric humor.

Muggy Weather

I know why there's a beer keg standing by
Muggy weather
Just can't get my poorself together
Without a pint or three.
(Apologies to Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler).

Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words is now an extremely rare volume: ABPC notes only one copy at auction since 1970 and OCLC/KVK record only four copies in institutional holdings worldwide.
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[LISLE, Joseph]. Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words. London: Thomas McLean, 1828. Small oblong quarto (6 1/2 x 10 in; 166 x 253 mm). Forty hand-colored aquatint plates, watermarked 1825, with interleaves.

The Plates:
1.    An Action off Spit-Head
2.    Muggy Weather
3.    A Cutlass. (Cut-Lass)
4.    A Chaste Character. (Chased)
5.    An Ad-mired Character
6.    Lath
7.    Plaister
8.    A Coal Meter. (A Coal meet-Her)
9.    A Rain Bow. (Beau)
10.  An Officious Character. (O-Fish's)
11.  A Jewel. (A Jew-Ill.)
12.  A Sub-Lime Character
13.  A Stage Manager
14.  A Stable Character
15.  My Hog & I. (Mahogany)
16.  Elegant Extracts
17.  A very amusing Company. (Ham-using)
18.  Sootable (Suitable) Characters
19.  A Charger
20.  A Sophist-Ical Argument
21.  Taking a Galloway. (Girl Away)
22.  A Diving Belle
23.  The Dread-Nought taking A Smack
24.  Moore's (Blackamoors.) Loves of the Angels
25.  A Grenadier. (Granny-dear)
26.  A Pioneer. (A Pie-on-here)
27.  Misadvised. (Miss-advised)
28.  A Dutch Place. (Plaice)
29.  May we meet more numerous & never less respectable
30.  Metaphysics. (Met-he-Physics?)
31.  Coming off with a claw (éclat)
32.  A Common Sewer. (Sower)
33.  Empailed. (Him pailed)
34.  Mutual Civility
35.  An Armless (Harmless) Character
36.  Canon Law. (Cannon)
37.  (History) His-story
38.  The Infant in Arms
39.  A Man Milling her. (Milliner)
40.  Mistaken. (Miss-taken)

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Images from Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

Images of Very Fond of Prints and a Drawing Master and A Designing Master courtesy of the British Museum, with our thanks.
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Bring Me The Head Of St. Lawrence Of Rome, Patron Saint Of Librarians

By Stephen J. Gertz

Martyrs roasting on an open fire,

Larry's last words bravely won:

Though it's been said many times many ways,

"Stick a fork in me, I'm done."

He's a patron saint of librarians because he sacrificed his life to save Church documents. He's the patron saint of cooks because he knew what it was like to be on the wrong end of a basting brush. And he's the patron saint of comedians because he was dying onstage yet still riffed a wisecrack.

The only Church deacon (of seven) to survive the Emperor Valerian's persecution in 258, St. Lawrence was afterward soon arrested for refusing to turn over Church treasures. By legend he was grilled to death and is said to have had the presence of mind to joke to his torturers, "I'm done on this side; turn me over."

There but for a consonant a myth is born. In the early twentieth century historian Rev. Patrick Healy postulated that the tradition was based upon a simple error. The Church formula for announcing the death of a martyr, Passus est ("he suffered," i.e. was martyred) was mangled, the "P" early lost in transcription, and Assus est - "He roasted" -  became the received truth. Not that Healy's hypothesis was accepted. It threw cold water on St. Lawrence; the faithful prefer the fire.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).

"His charred body was claimed by the Christians, and his mummified skull is still in the care of the popes. At the Vatican on the tenth of August every year they expose in its golden reliquary the head of Saint Lawrence that still, in the distorted mouth, in the burned bone of the skull, shows the agony he suffered to defend the archives of the popes" (Maria Luisa Ambrosini and Mary Willis, The Secret Archives of the Vatican. New York: 1996, p. 27).

Another apocryphal story, by way of Father Jacques Marquette, is that St. Lawrence inspired the classic Julie London hit tune Cry Me a River before being beheaded (his likely demise).



It is not true, however, that the story of St. Lawrence inspired Peter Greenaway's  1989 cinematic salute to roast human, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.
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Image of St. Lawrence courtesy of Infolit, with our thanks.
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The 2000 Year Old Man Talks Rare Books

by Stephen J. Gertz

At the recent 45th California  International Antiquarian Book Fair, the 2000 Year Old Man, the oldest rare book dealer in the history of the world, exhibited for the first time.

Booktryst had an opportunity to talk to him in the exhibitor hospitality suite.

SJG: Excuse me, Sir, is it true that you're the oldest living rare book dealer in the world?

2000 Year Old Man: Yes, I've been selling rare books since twelve.

SJG: Twelve years old?

2000 YOM: No. 12. The year.

SJG: You started early.

2000 YOM: Six months.

SJG: The year?

2000 YOM: No, age. There was no such thing as childhood when I was a kid. You were born, you were weaned, you went to work. I was an apprentice 2000 years before I went out on my own, in 12. There's a lot to learn.

SJG: So, you're actually 4000 years old?

2000 YOM: Yes, but it creeps-out the chicks so I lie. 2000 years old, they can live with.

SJG: What rare book shop did you serve your apprenticeship in?

2000 YOM: The rare book shop where I served my apprenticeship was Between the Scrolls. It was that or The Scroll Shop LLC, Lux Scrollis, Scroll Hunter's Holiday, or Scrolls R Us. I went with Between the Scrolls.

SJG: Why?

2000 YOM: Lots of action. There was always something going on.

SJG: Tell us about a typical day at Between the Scrolls..

2000 YOM: Oy, you wouldn't believe. Caesar and Cleopatra. Anthony and Cleopatra. Always between the scrolls, making out. No shame. No shame at all.

SJG: Who was the worst?

2000 YOM: Lipschitz and Cleopatra.

SJG: Lipschitz?

2000 YOM: Maximus Gaius Cornelius Murray Lipschitz. The general who became a slave! The slave who became a gladiator! The gladiator who became a dentist with a lucrative, high-end practice catering to the  patrician class! A great book collector, by the way.

SJG: What did he collect?

2000 YOM: Hammurabi first editions. Very heavy reading.

SJG: Deep intellectual content?

2000 YOM: No, two tons. They wrote on rocks in those days. You could get a hernia just turning a page. I once read Tolst-Oy bin Riten's 1782 B.C. classic, War and War, in it's first edition, on polished granite in a fine cuneiform hand, in a contemporary full coral and cobalt Travertine marble binding. A work of art. But heavy. Oy! I tore my rotator cuffs to shreds trying to flip to the index.

SJG: How were they shelved?

2000 YOM: Shelved? There were no shelves. You bought a book, it was delivered by cart, and slaves shlepped it into a pile in a corner of  your living room, next to the Barcolounger.

SJG: Who were your favorite authors in those days?

2000 YOM: Well, you know, there wasn't much to read way back then.

SJG: No?

2000 YOM: Nah. You had grainary reports, accounting ledgers,  royal victory propaganda...Nothing to read at the beach. Feh!

SJG: So, what did you read?

2000 YOM: Trash. I loved reading trash.

SJG: Why did you love reading trash?

2000 YOM: There was no shortage of it. Coffee cups, MacDonald's wrappers, bills, coupons, collection notices, empty cereal boxes, you name it. Where's there's people, there's trash.

2000 YOM: I draw the line at garbage, though. I won't read garbage. Yeccchhh!

SJG: What about later? Who did you read later?

2000 YOM: Oh, there was Pliny -

SJG: - The Younger or Elder?

2000 YOM: Younger, Elder, in between. Plenty o' Pliny. Good and Pliny. Couldn't get enough Pliny.

SJG: Did  you read Agricola?

2000 YOM: Read Agricola? I drank Agricola! It's the perfect beverage. The essence of the cola nut combined with notes of Spring crops. Very refreshing.

SJG: Carbonated?

2000 YOM: Of course, naturally. They threw a little activated carbon in there to purify it. You could die from the water back then.

SJG: Let's get back to your book shop.

2000 YOM: You have a time machine?

SJG: What was the oldest, rarest book you ever bought?

2000 YOM: The oldest, rarest book I ever bought was The Book of Moses.

SJG: First edition?

2000 YOM: Better. Original manuscript with corrections in his own hand.

SJG: I thought there were five books of Moses.

2000 YOM: There were but Moe only wrote the first one.

SJG: Really?

2000 YOM: Sure. He started the second, got a bad case of writer's cramp and that was that. You try writing with a stick. If he had a nice Bic pen, another story altogether but there you go.

SJG: Who wrote the others?

2000 YOM: Well, aside from Moe there was Larry, Curly, Shemp, and Joe.

SJG: The Stooges?

2000 YOM: Stooges of the Lord, to you. Don't be a wisenheimer.

SJG: What did it sell for?

2000 YOM: I haven't offered it until now. I've kept it in a vault since I bought it.

SJG: When did you buy it?

2000 YOM: I bought it in 452. A rich collector needed a little quick cash to get out of Rome before Attila the Hun showed up.

SJG: How much are you asking?

2000 YOM: 100 million dollars.

SJG: That's a lot of money.

2000 YOM: But free shipping and passes to Disneyland included!

SJG: What, if you don't mind my asking, did you pay for it back then?

2000 YOM: Back then I paid 500,000 shekels.

SJG: What's that in today's dollars?

2000 YOM: $17.50.

SJG: My goodness, that's not very much money for the original manuscript to the first book of the greatest work ever written, one that's influenced millions and millions and millions of people since it first came out.

2000 YOM: I could of done better. If I'd known it was going to be such a great big huge success I could have gotten it direct from Moe for practically nothing.  It was originally rejected by  all the publishers;  too many begats, not enough sex and violence. He never thought it would catch on. I could have gotten his desk, too. A robe. Who knew? I could kick myself.

By the way, who do you have to shtup to get a piece o' rugelach around here? They got pretzels up the keister, nuts, candy, some kind of mystery canapé but not a single prune rugelach.

SJG: Did you have any celebrity clients?

2000 YOM: Oh, yes, yes, yes, indeed, of course, I had many, many celebrity clients.

SJG: Who was your most interesting celebrity client?

2000 YOM: My most interesting celebrity client was King Solomon.

SJG: The King Solomon?

2000 YOM: There was another one? First time he came in, he was with a real geszunta moid, a very healthy maiden, if you know what I mean. Zaftig. Such a punim. He says, "I'm King Solomon." I couldn't believe it.

My wife says, "Right, and I'm the Queen of Sheba."

And the gezunta moid says to her, "No, I am. Really."

SJG: Wow, that must have really been  something.

2000 YOM: Oh, boy! You don't know the half of it. They both wanted the same book.

SJG: What book was that?

2000 YOM: When Bad Hittites Happen To Good Hebrews. A cautionary tale with a message.

SJG: What happened?

2000 YOM: They were fighting over it. Finally, I took an axe, chopped the book in two, and gave them each half.

"You should be so wise," Sheba said to Sol.

SJG: Speaking of wisdom, why, after all these years, are you only now exhibiting at an antiquarian book fair"

2000 YOM: I saw the sign outside, Antiquarian Book Fair. I figured,  I  sell books; who's more antiquarian than me? I'm the most antiquarian bookseller you'll ever meet.

SJG: You certainly are, Sir. 4000 years old.

2000 YOM: Shhhh! Keep it down. I got my eye on that chick over there. She reminds me of one of my ex-girlfriends.

SJG: Who was that?

2000 YOM: The Empress Messalina. I love it when women wear glasses.

SJG: Why is that?

2000 YOM: When they take them off, it sends me.

SJG: Let's not go there.

2000 YOM: Why not? I'm still vital. I'm a very vital guy.

SJG: You're certainly an inspiration, Sir. Do you have any advice for book collectors?

2000 YOM: Yes! My advice to book collectors is to not buy rare books on rocks.

SJG: Do you have something against geology?

2000 YOM: I love geology! Geology's wonderful. It's my favorite of all the ologies. But rare rock books? You could give yourself a rupture. Who needs it? Feh!

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Apologies, respect and admiration to Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, who began as writers and whose early 1960s improv routine for friends at parties developed into a textbook on comedy. Individually and as a team they are American Treasures.

Here's a classic bit:


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Lenny Bruce, Screenwriter

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1953, the year that Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot made its first public stage debut, another holy scripture found its place in the pantheon of dramaturgy.

Sleaze! Sex! Trashy production values! Timothy Farrell is Umberto Scalli, a gangster operating a seedy dance hall. Up-and-coming screen sensation, Lenny Bruce, is Vincent, his sadistic bodyguard keeping the girls on edge and the customers in line. Curvaceous co-star Honey Harlowe is Rose, whose shapely charms launched a thousand quips. Sally Marr is the weary-wise hostess with the mostess. Bunny Parker and Joie Abrams are dance hall girls with moves not taught by Arthur Murray. And Bernie Jones is Punky the Swedish Sailor, who passed-out in a Bergman film and woke up in this sordid nightmare of cheap thrills, hot flesh, violence, and depraved desires!

Fast and furious action, suspense, drama, and sexploitation...It's  Dance Hall Racket!

It's the tender tale of a young performer on the make, his desperate dream of movie stardom and attempt to make it happen with a screenplay from hunger; a honey of a wife, an ecdysiast built to last; his mother, Sally, a former burlesque comedienne; a director who studied at the Ed Wood Jr. school of cinema; and Punky the Swedish Sailor, who pines for a smorgasbord of Nordic meatballs while drowning his sorrows in a Baltic sea of eau-de-vie.

And you, had it not sold instantly upon offering by Royal Books, could have owned an archive of this grade-Z movie from Screen Classics, the Poverty Row studio that tramped the  boulevard of broken dreams, put the hobo in Hollywood, and found lead in them thar golden hills. It was helmed by Phil Tucker, the director who soon afterward brought Robot Monster to the silver screen, a movie that gives Plan 9 From Outer Space a serious run for the money as the Worst Movie of All Time, and, it is reported, inspired the director's attempted suicide.

Set of 51 3 x 5 in. stills, incl. receipt signed in red ink
by Farrell: "Publicity pictures of me in Dance Hall Racket."
Los Angeles: Screen Classics, 1953

In 1951, Lenny Bruce met his future wife, Honey Harlowe, while she was working as a stripper at a club in Baltimore. Bruce was determined to improve their show business prospects, engaging in schemes legit and not-so to further their dreams. In 1953, the couple moved to Los Angeles from New York.

Set of 12 8 x 10 in. stills.
Los Angeles: Screen Classics, 1953

Upon arrival, they moved up the T&A ladder, finding work at The Cup and Saucer, later Strip City, and The Colony Club. 

The Colony Club was the classiest, best strip joint in L.A. and it was while working there that Lenny concocted the idea of a movie set in the world of burlesque, quoth the raven, "Dance Hall Racket."

The archive belonged to DHR star, Timothy Farrell (1922 - 1989). Farrell "worked as a bailiff in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department while also working in the movies. One of his movies, Paris After Midnight,  was actually busted in a vice raid in the mid-50s, which caused him professional embarrassment. He went on to work 20 years as a L.A. Deputy Marshall and eventually was appointed County Marshall in 1971. He was convicted of felony charges after his appointment, however, for 'illegal use of Deputy Marshalls in political activities,' and was given a six month sentence, but received probation due to poor health. He was fired in 1975" (IMDB). 

In the same year he starred in Dance Hall Racket, Farrell appeared in Ed Wood Jr.'s adventures of a tranny, Glenn Or Glenda? But not before appearing in Racket Girls (gangsters n' female wrestlers, 1951), and, later, Ed Wood Jr.'s immortal Jail Bait (1954).

BRUCE, Lenny. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.
Chicago: Playboy Press, [1965].
Advice from the Dale Carnegie of comedy.

Lenny Bruce's attempt at prose was more successful. How To Talk Dirty  and Influence People, the autobiography written after he'd attained stardom as a "sick" comedian whose satire laid waste to hypocrisy and forever changed the world of stand-up comedy, remains highly readable.

BRUCE, Honey with Dana Benenson. Honey.
The Life and Loves of Lenny's Shady Lady.
Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976.
Lenny's "shiksa-goddess" tells all.

Honey Harlowe, after Lenny's death, wrote "what is possibly the most shockingly intimate and most frankly erotic woman's story of even our liberated time" (jacket blurb). In comparison with today's even looser standards, it could have been written by Louisa May Alcott, Meg Comes Clean.

Of Dance Hall Racket, she wrote, "Lenny never made any real money writing, although he was paid $750 a week for rewriting the movie script The Kid From Outer Space [aka The Rocket Man]. None of the four movies he wrote [Dance Hall Racket, Dream Follies, The Rocket Man, and The Leather Jacket] got past the grade-B level. The most outrageous of his scripts was Dance Hall Racket. It was about a Italian gangster (Lenny) and his girl (me). The script was actually a rewrite and so corny it became funny. The best scene Lenny wrote for me was when I was be be presented to a big-time gangster as a welcome-home-from-prison present. I was dressed in a white bikini, high heels, and a white-fox stole, and upon cue I came crashing through a tremendous cake" (p. 222-223).

He who gets slapped.
"This is the worst screenplay I've ever read!"

From left.: Punky the Swedish Sailor; Honey Harlowe;
Timothy Farrell; Lenny Bruce.

Punky the Swedish Sailor cleans up the pastry, then gets plastered.



View all fifty-three minutes of Dance Hall Racket, above.
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Archive images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.

Book images from the author's collection.

Dance Hall Racket is an orphan the public domain.
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Woody Allen Books and the High Cost of Irony

by Stephen J. Gertz

If you collect the works of Woody Allen and wish to possess Four Films of Woody Allen (New York: Random House, 1982) a near fine, super-association/presentation copy inscribed to his  now ex-wife, Mia Farrow, must surely be the sweetest, most desirable to own. Its ironic inscription is priceless.

But rare book dealers are not altruists.

Originally sold by Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, June 27, 2010, this copy is now being offered for $7,500 by Biblioctopus.

Only one other signed copy is currently on the market. It, too, is in near fine condition. It is being offered by James Pepper Rare Books for $1,500.

Premium for deeply ironic inscription: $6,000. And worth every penny. Events subsequent to the inscription provide a subtext to it that's a book in itself and could not be more rich, ripe, and, ultimately, poignant. In the absence of an Allen first edition annotated by him this has to be the collectible Woody Allen book.

Image from Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

It is not necessary to rehash the Allen-Farrow scandal here. Suffice it to say, at some point post-mishegas, Ms. Farrow bid goodbye, good riddance, and vamoose to her  collection of Woody Allen books. They must have seemed like scalpels on the shelf, this particular book with its inscription a stiletto twisting into her gut as the coup de grâce.
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Images courtesy of Biblioctopus, with our thanks.
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S.J. Perelman, Humorist, Cardiology a Specialty

by Stephen J. Gertz

So, you wake up at 12:20 AM in a sweat, dizzy, pressure in your chest. You've been here before, twenty-one years ago, when you were thirty-eight: you don't panic; you wait for the angina to pass. It doesn't. There must be one but you can't find a carotid or radial pulse. When you finally wrap your head around here-we-go-again heart attack, you call EMT. It's progressing, and, unlike earlier periods in life, you don't want to die. Not now. You're  just getting started.

Your heart is in V-Tak, but not just plain ol' everyday simple ventricular tachycardia; noooooo,  because it's you and only the weird will do, you have to have wide-complex supraventricular tachycardia, 183 bpm, maximum heart rate for a guy your age is 161, plus/minus 20, so no matter how you calculate you're over the speed limit, the drug x2 to bring it under control is no-go, the morphine x3 is not putting a dent in the pain, you don't remember the paddles and - CLEAR! - shock to bring the beater under control but it does after close to forty-five minutes of runaway freight train any instant V-Fib, you're dead, and next  you're in the cath lab because this kind of ventricular misbehavior is often associated with a massive coronary but it wasn't an infarct yet the last of three major coronary arteries that still functions is 90% occluded so a stent is inserted to prevent the inevitable and you're lucky to have not dropped dead, heart dying for a deep breath.

Question: When the paramedics were supporting your feeble efforts to walk from the bedroom to the gurney because your arms and legs were numb, you were too dizzy to solo, and you weakly mumbled, "grab that book," what book was it?

In the above, all too real scenario, your now thankfully alive and, miraculously, heart-undamaged correspondent opted for an anthology of S. J. Perelman's comic essays. If I was extremely lucky and it was going to be a very long night with a need for something to read in the CCU afterward, I wanted something to make me feel alive. If I was going to die, I was going to die laughing.

I blame Lorne Bair, Tom Congalton and Dan Gregory, of Lorne Bair Rare Books and Between the Covers, respectively, who recently acquired the library of the great art director and graphic artist, Ben Shahn, within which was a cache of Perelman firsts inscribed to Shahn by his good friend. Thank you.

The Rising Gorge
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.
Dust jacket design by Ben Shahn.

I see the Perelmans in their catalog and I'm transported to Cloudland and broad brain smiles. This is the writer I began reading as a kid when I noticed his name as co-screenwriter on a couple of Marx Brothers pics, the Marx Bros. being my older siblings in spirit, and who, by reading every prose work he ever wrote, collected in twenty-one books, taught me how to write because he was one of the finest writers the U.S. has ever produced and the 20th century's wittiest in English though he never wrote prose longer than the comic essay; a writer's writer who awed others, an obsessive craftsman who would take a day to compose a sentence to his satisfaction, possessed an erudition and  vocabulary second to none, luxuriated in language, had a sense of satire, parody and the absurd above and beyond, played with words like a kid in a sandbox, and had a gift for brilliant non-sequitors. 

His awestruck fans included E.B. White, Robert Benchley (who deferentially referred to Perelman as dementia praecoxswain), E.E. Cummings, Eudora Welty, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal; too many more to enumerate.  His literary brilliance was recognized by his peers. Oh, and Groucho, who blurbed of Dawn Ginsberg's Revenge (1929), Perelman's first collection, "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it."

"A knock on the door aroused Dawn from her lethargy. She hastily slipped it off and donned an abstraction. This was Dawn, flitting lightly from lethargy to abstraction and back to precipice again,. Or from Beethoven to Bach and Bach to Bach again."

Swiss Family Perelman
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950.

For Ben,
Another vignette of tsouris, self-
induced by one who modestly con-
siders himself an
expert at self-destruction.
Tout à vous,
Sid

Without Perelman, no Woody Allen fiction. In fact, without Perelman there is no modern, short comic essay, period. Mark Leyner's minor masterpiece, Einstein on the Phone - purported FBI wiretap transcripts of conversations between Albert Einstein and actress Mary Astor (they're lovers and he's jealous of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman), who complains that she's not getting the credit she deserves for key aspects of his work, and Einstein and Meyer Lansky discussing gambling, odds, relativity, whether the universe is a crap-shoot and God is really playing dice - would never have been written without Perelman's lead. Too many others to note here. Suffice it to say, anyone writing humor pieces today owes a debt of gratitude to Perelman. It's unavoidable.

"What happens to you when you read Perelman and you're a young writer is fatal because his style seeps into you. He's got such a pronounced, overwhelming  comic style that it's very hard not to be influenced by him" (Woody Allen).

Why use  'kiss" when "osculate" so chewably fills the mouth and sounds so obliquely and innocently obscene? Perelman was the most literate American humorist of the 20th century and presumed that you weren't afraid to consult a dictionary. He respected your intelligence and that you were a reader. He was, in fact, the reader's humorist.

"People who like my work have to understand words and their juxtaposition as well as the images they create. It's very hard to make a person laugh who doesn't have inside him the words I use. My humor is of the free association kind, and in order to enjoy it, you have to have a good background in reading. It's a heavy strain for people to haven't read much."

Westward Ha!
Around the World in 80 Cliches.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948.
Drawings by [Al] Hirshfeld.

For Ben,
this somber record of escapism and
peevish ululation, with homage
Sid.

Not so by the way, Nathanael West (b. Nathan Weinstein) was his closest friend; they attended Brown together, and he later married West's sister, Laura. The overwhelming number of his comic pieces originally appeared in The New Yorker. He shared an Academy Award® in 1956 for his adapted screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days.

Significantly, Perelman was the first  writer in English to seamlessly integrate the language of high and low culture into his work, often gliding between the two within the same sentence deftly, with flair, easily without forcing it, a lesson lost on many of his heirs.

As for me, my 72-hour nightmare last week is summed-up by the title to one of Perelman's self-described feuilletons wherein reality and absurdity collide and  dine together over nice hot pastrami and delicate penne al pesto ala Pisa: Pulse Rapid, Respiration Lean, No Mustard.

Yet I was left with a condiment. Just prior to the tap into my right femoral artery at the groin to insert the catheter, a creative  prep nurse with razor and  wicked sense of humor shaved and left a landing strip where a  forest primeval once thrived.

Yes, it was a major, life-altering experience. I begin my new career as a male porn star next week.
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Book images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Like my humorists, I prefer my heart docs to be hyphenates. And so, I highly recommend Dr. Steven J. Levine, Cardiologist who saved my life - Restaurateur, owner of Wilshire in Santa Monica, California. You'll dine in a casually elegant atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, your host, Al Fresco. I figure order hearts of palm if on the menu, the healthiest in town, I'll bet.

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Hail, Bald Guys! 9th Century Poem Celebrates Hair Loss

A very rare book praises  the follicle-challenged.

by Stephen J. Gertz

MEMO TO: Larry David

FROM:  Hucbald, 9th C. Benedictine monk

CC: All bald men; Dr. Bosley; Hair Club for Men; Toupees R Us.

Pursuant to our broken phone call (connections in the ninth century notoriously unreliable; can you hear me now?), I present you with a charming little comb-over I wrote  to put the peachy-keen in alopecia, if not the peach fuzz on your spartan pate.

My De Laude Calvorum ad Carolum Calvum Imperatorem is "the only philosophic treatment of the subject which  has ever been produced,"  so sayeth F.J.E. Raby in A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (1934). Don't blame me for the title; the publisher thought it was catchy but just because your name is Heironymous Wellaeus doesn't mean you have a gift for titles as tongue music.

Speaking of which, I'm known primarily as the man who wrote the first systematic work on Western music theory. Yet here I am pitching a poem I wrote c. 880 CE, first printed c. 1496, and here in its second edition of 1562 to a guy who appears to have no appreciation at all for The Blessed Tonsure From God and the gifts thereby bestowed. The ways of our Lord are indeed mysterious; go figure. Were I not already a monk I'd turn away from this world wherein scholarship is unrewarded unless it's got a gimmick that sells.

"I tawt I taw a tautogram!"

Yeah, I've got one; my genius editor's big idea. The poem is 148 lines long and EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WORD OF IT BEGINS WITH THE LETTER "C"! It's a literary device known as "paramoion," more commonly known today as a tautogram. Incomprehensible incoherence indicates inane  incorrigible  ignorance / Instances  inordinate inconceivable inconvenience / Inconsiderate  idiots insipidly intone In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. You think it's easy? Try working it into a script for the show, I dare you, without seriously herniating a declension or two.

You'll be dazed by a maze of alliterations that set out to prove, conclusively and once and for all, "that the best and greatest men have had the honor of being bald - dignitaries of the Church, saintly eremites, men of learning, poets, kings, soldiers [keep that helmet on; when asked, don't tell] and physicians, to say nothing of Elisha and Paul. [Okay, I'll say nothing of Elisha and Paul]. Perhaps the best passage is that in which Hucbald sets forth the skill of bald physicians" (Raby, again. I generally don't read reviews but this one's good).

There you have it; the most important thing you'll take away from my poem: When shopping for a doctor, bald is the way to go - and Jewish, too. Bald, Jewish doctors, the prescription for health. L'chaim, bubelah!

By the way, it is an ugly rumor that I wrote and then dedicated the poem to my cousin, Holy Roman emperor Charles the Bald, as a buss to his buttocks. They don't call me Hucbald because of my luxurious mane. I prefer to think of the poem as an exercise in developing self-esteem, and if works for cousin Chuck, too, so much the better. Decent sinecures are hard to come by; sue me.

Need I add that Gaius Julius Caesar was spare on the skull yet ruled the world and had sex with Cleopatra. There's hope for you yet.

Some interpret the cognomen Caesar to refer to those men of the House of the Julii who were blessed with long though less hair, more scalp. The letter "C" in Latin is pronounced as a "k," and "ae" is pronounced "i," so when the Western Empire shrunk and all that survived was, essentially, Germany and environs it's no surprise that the emperor was known as Kaiser.

And so it is with great affection that you have been to your  fans and shall always remain the Kaiser of your domain. Curb thine enthusiasm.

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HUCBALD of St. Amand. De laude calvorum ad Carolum Calvum Imperatorem, mirabile opus centum triginta trium versuum, in quo omnia verba a litera C incipiunt...Louvain: Heironymus Wellaeus, 1562. Second edition, of extreme rarity with no records in RILN, KVK, COPAC, or OCLC. 12mo. [8] pp. Roman letter, woodcut initials.  Hain 8971. Goff H501.

First published at Mainz c. 1496 by Peter Friedberg.

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Images of De laude calvorum ad Carolum Calvum Imperatorem courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, with our thanks. Collectors may inquire  here.

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