I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to officially unveil my latest website. GreatForgottenHumorists.com
This is what the Internet was made for. History for the sheer joy of doing the research. Product with no pecuniary value, but worthy of the time devoted to it. Stuff hidden in plain sight brought to everyone who is interested in looking.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times my collection of books by and about humorists. It’s grown spectacularly over the years and now is housed in 14 large bookcases. Roaming through the aisles (yes, literally aisles), I kept finding authors I somehow knew were important but whose biographies were invisible and intangible. So I started putting together little articles on these authors before appending their humor bibliographies adding to or correcting what little Wikipedia has.
Most, maybe all, the names will mean nothing to modern eyes. But they were giants of the day. George Ade was the leading humorist in the first decade of the 20th century, the first comic millionaire, wrote syndicated newspaper Fables about modern society that eventually ran into 10 volumes. His risqué little number of 1904, a play titled The College Widow, was made and remade in films, eventually being stolen wholesale for the plot of the Marx Brothers’ Horsefeathers. Time he got credit for it.
Other names. Corey Ford, whose parodies made him a bestseller. Charles Wayland Towne, better known once as “Gideon Wurdz” (giddy on words, get it?). Richard Armour, who in the 1950s sold millions of Americans humorous books about Shakespeare and American History. Maybe education really was better then. The astounding Chic Sale, a vaudeville comedian, who put his monologue on building outhouses into print, and eventually sold 2,600,000 copies! They were spectacularly famous once, for real.
Other weirdness. Quick Books, pocket sized collections of humor that could be mailed to troops in WWII. Hollow Books, old books with the insides cut out so you could open the cover and be surprised by the joke at the bottom.
Other stuff. Just stuff. Random stuff that pops up once a collection reaches into the thousands. Stuff that tickles my fancy. Stuff that a search about these people wouldn’t find elsewhere. Stuff that will continue to trickle out of my computer at a terribly slow rate because it’s so hard to put together but so much fun when it finally goes online.
Does any of this interest others? Beats me. I don’t care. I’m doing this because this is what I do, and doing what I do makes me happy. If you care to share, great. If not, that’s fine too. Nothing will stop me unless my bookcases fall over and topple the next row of bookcases, spilling thousands of books to the floor in random order. That actually happened. And yet here I am.
Thank you for your time and attention.
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