This collection is a collaborative effort by two people who worked for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before Lileks was there. Ed Fischer was a cartoonist, and Jane Thomas Nuland was books editor. So this collection is about aging, one page a cartoon and the facing page a quip, a gag, a little story, or a little poem by Ms. Noland.
So: I dunno, about the same as you’d get from, say, a collection of Saturday Evening Post material (ye gods, have I reported on three? 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, yes indeedy–but in my defense, this blog is coming up on 22 years old now, so I am reading other things in between). Not as quotable nor retellable as what you would get out of a collection of jokes or Reader’s Digest every month, but amusing. Presumably, a lot of these were given as birthday gifts for someone turning 40, 50, or 60 back in the day where people photocopied cartoons to tack onto their cubicles or tape to the walls of their workspaces.
So an hour or so browsing, one more book on the annual list, and not a great expense–it was stuffed into a $3 bag amongst other gleanings in Sparta in October.
It’s funny to think, though, that this sort of thing (and Reader’s Digest) might have been the equivalent of TikTok for the pre-Internet generation. A series of short, unrelated things for amusement that passed right through the eyes and through the brain, presumably, but not retained. I guess the main difference is the lack of infinite scroll, so eventually you come to the end of the book or the end of the magazine and have to get up and do something in real life for a bit before picking up another one. Or maybe not; perhaps I am tweely pronouncing whatever little thought comes into my little mind at any time.
