"In this book are powerful satires to help restore your sanity."

This 35¢ Ballantine paperback collection of pieces by some of the most famous humorists of the 1950s is so out of print that even Amazon doesn’t seem to have a readily available bare listing for it. Within its 154 pages are essays, illustrations and song lyrics by Robert Benchley, S.J. Perelman, James Thurber and Ogden Nash, among others. Leading off the book is “The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down: My Own New York Childhood,” a ridiculous “memoir” by Frank Sullivan. He’s all but forgotten now, but Sullivan was a prominent humorist for the New York World and the New Yorker from the 1920s to the 1950s. A page about him on a website about Saratoga Springs (his hometown) recalls Sullivan as being “known for his gentle touch and for the collection of fictitious characters he created: Aunt Sally Gallup, Martha Hepplethwaite, the Forgotten Bach (a member of the Bach family who was tone deaf), and Mr. Arbuthnot, the cliché expert.” An excerpt from his piece in The Wild Reader:

“Father was very strict about the aristocratic old New York ritual of the Saturday-night bath. Every Saturday night at eight sharp we would line up: Father; Mother; Diamond Jim Brady; Mrs. Dalrymple, the housekeeper; Absentweather, the butler; Aggie, the second girl; Aggie, the third girl; Aggie, the fourth girl; and the twelve of us youngsters, each equipped with soap and a towel. At a command of our father, we would leave our mansion on East Thirtieth Street and proceed solemnly up Fifth Avenue in single file to the old reservoir, keeping a sharp eye out for Indians. Then, at a signal from Papa, in we’d go. Everyone who was anyone in New York in those days had a Saturday-night bath in the reservoir.”