Inside Jacket

Every now and again, I come across a book that stops me in my tracks. Fanny Hill’s Cook Book by Lionel H. Braun and William Adams was that book today. Illustrated by Brian Forbes with a memorable cover, the book was published in 1971. I love the descriptions by the bookseller’s offering it for sale.

“If a cookbook can have a rating, this would have an R-Rating. Quirky erotic book with real recipes written with sexual innuendos about the ingredients or the construction of the recipe. Every recipe takes two pages because of the big sketch of a BIG bosomed woman in a suggestive pose,” writes Maze Books in California.

“The instructions are uncensored. The recipes are highly spiced. The drawings are superbly decadent. The book is beautifully shocking or marvelously funny, as you prefer,” writes On The Road Bookshop in Connecticut.

Apparently, the recipes include Whores d’Oeuvres, Hot Bitch in a Blanket and Fellatio Mignon. What a gem! What would John Cleland, creator of Fanny Hill in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure back in 1748, think of this book?

Want to own the catcher in the loo? Sorry, sorry.

As a man who famously cherished his privacy and abhorred fame, I wonder what J.D. Salinger would make of the fact that his used toilet is up for auction. The asking price? A cool million dollars.

It seems the couple who purchased the Salingers’ Cornish, NH home recently decided to replace the toilet and sell the one sat upon by the reclusive author’s famous tush. And no, I have zero idea if this is legitimate or not (how would one prove previous ownership of a toilet?), but it comes with a letter of authenticity, ostensibly from the new owners.

Not Salinger’s toilet. Just a picture of a regular toilet. DO NOT PAY $1,000,000 FOR THIS TOILET

Part of me thinks these people are opportunistic gremlins who should be ashamed of themselves for being greedy and cashing in. But part of me thinks if there is actually someone out there with a ratio of money to common sense SO SKEWED as to pay anywhere near a million dollars for a used crapper, then they deserve to be very, very parted from said money.

As for Salinger himself, I imagine he’d be disgusted by the entire debacle, and saddened at the declining state of humanity, and full of despair, and all that.

But maybe not. Maybe he’d find it funny, and have a laugh at the idea of someone daft enough to pay through the nose for the privilege of reverently worshiping the place where he disposed of his bodily waste. I hope so.

The world is weird.

Remember Studebakers, the Model T, the ill-fated Edsel? Automobile design and technology have evolved by leaps and bounds over the last century, leaving behind legions of ardent fans who lovingly restore and show their vintage vehicles with pride, often collecting any related memorabilia, as well. This includes original owner’s manuals, advertisements, catalogs and more. We’ve found 25 of the most beautiful pieces about classic cars available on AbeBooks – see the books.

Happy birthday to weirdness in literature. AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room is a year old. We thought it would raise a smile or two but you actually bought the books and lots of them. Hands up if you purchased Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire, Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power, the International Book of Beer Can Collecting or the Dictionary of Pipe Organ Stops? There are more than 150 odd but strangely addictive books in there, many suggested by you.

I really loved the New Yorker blog Book Bench’s post this morning about the impending demise of the Cathy comic strip (finally). Many of the suggestions for how Cathy should end were hilarious, but mean-spirited. And it’s unsurprising, because Cathy, created by Cathy Guisewite, is an old-fashioned, innocent comic, out of its depth by today’s standards.

It’s funny that Meredith Blake, who wrote the post, should bring up The Family Circus, as well – I guess my mind isn’t the only one in which the two woefully outdated comics are intertwined. The Family Circus is downright eerie in some ways, with robed spectres of dead grandparents playfully haunting the children from time to time, and just too innocent to be funny in other ways. We get it, P.J. can’t pronouce “spaghetti”. It’s adorable. Pasketti. We get it.

Cathy just seems to have an enormous target on its (her?) back, in a world dominated by internet people trolling for their next victim of clever sarcasm. The simple formula of a woman trying to keep it together, constantly struggling with her weight, her diet, her (lack of, often) love life, her job, her budget and the like is nothing new to either reality or fictional media. But I think unlike the characters in Sex and the City, or Friends, who come off as lovable in their perfectly-polished quirks, Cathy often read as pathetic. She was often a sweaty mess in sweat pants, relying on the love of a cat and a tub of ice cream to comfort her when the hustle and bustle of the real world became too much. Constantly jamming the void in her soul and heart full of shoes, chocolate, sales at the mall and the like, it was hard not to wince and avert the eyes. Especially when it was intended as funny.

I think for some women, (not naming any names here, certainly not owning up to anything), the comic elicited cringes a lot more frequently than laughs. Partly, it just isn’t really funny, except in that Someone’s Got a Case of the Mondays kind of way, which has been done to death on mugs, calendars and novelty, mesh-backed hats for eons. Today’s edgy, blase audiences expect more, and sit stony-faced and yawning. Go ahead. make me laugh. Try.

But it also hits a little close to home. While Cathy is portrayed as cartoonishly bumbling, over-the-top sheepish and forever exasperated, she’s just an extreme caricature of what many of us struggle with – the battle between the desire to be comfortable but beautiful, relaxed but ambitious, honest but polished, successful, loved.

One can picture Cathy as a real woman, though possibly named Barb or Sue or Linda, easing her high heels off her swollen feet under her desk and trying to wedge the hole in her pantyhose between two of her toes. She sneaks a bit of diet, sugar-free chocolate from her desk drawer (sure, it upsets her stomach, but who can afford the calories? And we all need our little getaways during the day) and sighs contentedly. A coworker passes by her desk, and inquires what the good word might be. She replies with something about TGIF, or How goes the battle, or working hard or hardly working?, and their empty exchange is quickly forgotten. Her bright lipstick has faded throughout the day, leaving only a few coral flakes drying at the corners of her mouth, and her hairspray has given up the ghost, leaving her coiffure to sag in a slumped shadow of its earlier glory. Her smile is bright, but we see her, sitting beneath a poster of a cat dangling from a tree branch, with the words “Hang in there!”, and while her smile falters for a moment, we hope she does, and we think she will, and that is the way I want Cathy to end. With her hanging in there, and things looking up.

…in other news, how did I just end up writing a largely heartfelt (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) post about Cathy?! Need coffee…or chocolate… ACK!