THE TIMES PICAYUNE

New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.

27 October 1929

Literature and Less.

A Page on Books of the Day.

Conducted by John McClure.

Morrow’s Almanack and Every-Day Book.

“Morrow’s Almanack and Every-Day-Book” which was such a sparkling and amusing annual under the editorship of Burton Rascoe has lost Mr. Rascoe as editor. His successor, Thayer Hobson, who edits the new volume for 1930, has had the benefit of Mr. Rascoe's example, however, and retains him as a contributor, and the Almanack for next year is full of entertainment, though a little cruder than in seasons past. Some of the illustrations are particularly weak and there is a general tendency toward the risqué in the text. Where Burton Rascoe introduced a certain amount of spice into his galimatias, Mr. Hobson lays on salt and ginger a little thickly. Yet the volume is fun to browse in. It is thoroughly contemporary.

The almanac contains . . .

[ . . . ]

. . . an early American whisky bottle.

Burton Rascoe, former editor of the Almanack, contributes “Travel Is So Shrinkening,” “The Natural Resistance to Education,” “Some Lights Worth Seeing in New York,” “Panorama of Twilight, New York,” “The Last Stronghold of Snobbery,” a dissertation on waiters; “Success Secret No. 78489,” “A Negative Baedeker” (There is no five-and-ten-cent store in the Woolworth building—There is no Postal Telegraph station in the Postal Telegraph building—There is no terminal in the Bush Terminal building—There are no friars in the Friars’ Club, etc.), “The Pathos of Distance,” “New York Credo,” in which he indulges in a vulgar witticism that New Orleans will not thank him for; “Our Moral Myopia,” and “Anecdote for a Winter Night,” in which he tells how Aleister Crowley, the demonologist, failed in an attempt to raise the devil.