Don’t read it if your lips are chapped.
Clickbait goes back as far as advertising, but that line from 1934 stopped me in my tracks.
I’m writing an article about the Laugh Club, a book club started in 1932 by Robert M. McBride that proposed sending a new humor book to subscribers every two months, for a lower price even though the edition, unlike most book club reprints, was identical to the original. Sounds like a great deal for the Depression, but it lasted only two years.
One of the last books was The Nuder Gender, a first novel by Joseph Hilton Smyth. That title is clickbait itself, but the ad that was placed in Travel magazine, not coincidentally owned by Robert M. McBride, doubled-down on the come-on.
A rollicking yarn about a young man whose long search for a girl with two tiny moles on her left shoulder finally winds up in a nudist colony. Don’t read it if your lips are chapped.
Yarns don’t rollick much these days, shame on us, but it’s the chapped lips I’m fixated on.
All I can think of is that licking your lips when you see something really special, often in a sexy way, is a common trope, though I can’t remember seeing it in person. Am I missing some slang from the era? Why did the ad writer think this was the line to go with?
The book is basically a meet-cute rom-com with the nudist colony a throwaway bit. It first appeared as a serial in College Humor magazine, so no one of the day would have expected anything more than a glimpse and a giggle. Not a true lip-licker. That was the province of Thorne Smith, who, don’t get ahead of me, also was published by McBride. Ah, the prudish 30s.
