Yes, I stumbled onto three or four of his books in the library as a kid in the 60s. The only prank I still remember was that he and a friend set aside a dozen copies of a New York newspaper with the banner headline FDR REELECTED. Eighteen months later, a dozen co-conspirators spread out through a subway car, all reading this newspaper, to watch people’s reactions.
You all probably never heard of his books like How to Write Without Knowing Nothing, Don’t Get Perconel with a Chicken, and Write Me a Poem, Baby (the last two are anthologies of children’s writings). In the last one was a squib about “Gorge the Mechanic,” who fixed a squeaky car hood: “You put a peice of adheesive on it and it adhees. This fixs it.”
Just grabbed a book off the shelf that he edited, H. Allen Smith’s Desert Island Decameron. He wrote the introduction.