The 3^rd, man...

Well then there now, as Jimmy the D used to mumble, what have we got here? Just when you thought it was safe to go back and listen to Ethel Waters, here comes the third edition.

This here slab o’wax first hit the main stem back in 2000, then in 2004 it got a re-bore, some boss new fins and tailpipes, not to mention a whole heap of extra chrome and a three-tone paint job that’d cool all the studs and gators down on the strip. In short, it was bigger, with more entries, and a side-order of illustrations.

Ok, so what’s all the panic about this time? Fur trimmings? Reet pleats? Ol’ Dippermouth himself guesting on horn? Well, I ain’t sayin’ you’re right an’ I ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong, neither. Let’s just rest the weight for a while and we can discuss this.

First off, there’s a stack of new entries, from bug spray to goof syrup, from lupara sickness to a juice jolt. If you’re drowning under a whole heap of meadow mayonnaise, thinking of nosing a Tommy, lamping some ski jumps, harvesting a crop of lettuce, cattin’ around or heading straight down to hell in a low-top car, this edition might just melt the gold fillings in your mouth. Back seat bunnies, zip-gun angels, pucker-paint merchants and wolf-trap blondes – not to mention the strange return of the chinchilla killer diller – all these and more have been added, alongside box workers, main brains, dome docs, bears from the fair, lifelong gong kickers and three-dollar bills. What comes in when they leave the doors open? Why buy a cow when you can get milk through a fence? Is this stuff old enough to vote? How about that mess, and what are you going to do for friends when your brain gives out? The answers to these and many other pressing questions which have tormented philosophers down through the ages can now be found within.

Last time out of the gate, this here book also contained a handful of the pictures I’d been wanting to use, but this time, we’ve gone right overboard and doubled the size of the pages, while pretty much upping the number of images by a factor of ten. And brother, what pictures... Daddy-O, to employ the wise words of the late Erskine Caldwell, they’re the kind that really make you want to get down on the floor and start to lickin’ somethin’. Gasp in astonishment at the frankly asymmetrical moustache of pulp author McCall Horgan, the jiving skeletons adorning the dust jacket of Jonathan Latimer’s masterly Red Gardenias, or the ton-up boys on the cover of Gently Go Man, a novel which prompted none other than the Sunday Telegraph to declare ‘You’ll make with this book like crazy’. How right they were. See burleycue sensation Gypsy Rose Lee pretending to write her novel The G-String Murders, “Beatnik favourite Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong playing his famed trumpet in a ‘beatnik’ hangout”, Gene Krupa worn out after a strenuous bout of drumistics, what the well-dressed female sax player was wearing in 1911, and documentary evidence that young people were driven wild by the thought of a Shag back in 1937.

I’m scoring straight for you – this one’ll knock you bow-legged.

Fetch me my liquid ham and eggs,

MAX DÉCHARNÉ
London, 2009