The Complete Philanderer by Rex Stout Part two.

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Method continued

9) Play the extremes. Either melt here, overwhelm her with a wistful tenderness that would thaw the arctic, or go 100% bestial. It is often effective to switch from one extreme to the other, but requires practice. The happy medium is not worth a damn.

Raw Material.

By this Stout is referring to the type of ladies to search out and where to find them.

‘ I appreciate that many of you will be limited by the available supply, but in cities of over 100,0000 population a wide range offers itself, and even in smaller communities it is surprisingly what can be uncovered by a roving intelligence and an active spirit. The main thing is good leads. It is of course unethical to get them by display ads in the newspapers or by using sandwich men or throwaways, but it is also unnecessary. A little ingenuity and persistence will keep you going. Some hints: In New York, work the better bars, and when you see a good one spill a sidecar on her dress and insist on paying for it. In Chicago, haunt the railroad stations, for all the best material reaches instinctively for a time-table upon arriving at the age of consent.

Some practitioners, when working up raw material and testing a lead, give very little consideration to any other element than the Receptivity Quotient. Such a man is not, properly speaking, an amorist at all; he is merely a careerist. Sooner or later he will find his sensibilities blunted, his ability to synchronize permanently lessened, and his heart going back on him. In the long run, year in and year out, you will find that in appraising raw material it will produce the deepest satisfaction and the highest type of success to adhere rigidly to the AAA standards: Continue reading →

“Fadeless Sundour”

Found on the dust jacket of a Collins 1939 edition of Alice in Wonderland  this notice:

This book is bound in fadeless Sundour cloth, which can be lightly rubbed with a sponge when soiled, with perfect safety.

The cloth has hardly faded in its 77 year life and does not need sponging. The Sundour company is still going (in Warrington, Lancs) but now deals almost exclusively with curtains. Its involvement with book cloth seems to have ceased in the 1940s. There is very little online about this and Sundour’s fadeless cloth is mostly mentioned in the more meticulous used bookseller’s lists…

Blurb – the beginnings

The American humourist and illustrator Gelett Burgess is not much known in the UK. However, his very witty take on clichés and platitudes, Are You a Bromide ? (1907), deserves a place in the pantheon of classic US humour. Not only does it differentiate between Bromides and Sulphites—the former referring to someone set in their ways who uses trite sayings, while the latter are original thinkers with perceptive things to say, but it spawned the term ‘blurb’, which, of course, is still used today to describe a publisher’s puff for a new work.

The problem is that this word only appeared on the dust-jacket of Burgess’s book, which meant that—dust-jackets being discarded back then, as they still are, by all types of libraries, but not, thank goodness, by dealers—the term probably didn’t catch on as quickly as it should have done. And if it hadn’t been for scholars of book history, like dust-jacket supremo, Thomas Tanselle, the wrapper for Are You a Bromide might never have been brought into the light of day. Certainly, it was more innovative and amusing than most of this period. While the typical wrapper might feature a slightly modified reproduction of the title page, with perhaps some modest art work, Burgess’s is more like an advertising poster for the book. Hence it demonstrates precisely what a ‘blurb‘ was by giving an example of it. Clever stuff! [R.R.]

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