My sole purchase from the shelves of the overstuffed junk store on Milton (where Sun-Glo Lumber used to be, around the corner from my "Gin & Lime" apartment on Hecate) was the 1946 Viking Portable Alexander Woollcott (that's him above with his best friend Harpo Marx) 700 pages of the most forgotten of the Algonquins (Parker stays in print but several of her best lines are his) but so far it looks pretty funny & there's a whole special set of morbid frissons to be found in the perusal of outmoded popular texts. The book--hard linen cover, smaller than Portables became, with really good paper for just postwar--is a discard from the North Cowichan Elementary School Library, an old old discard, done with so many precise but impenetrable ink erasures that the identity of the school is revealed only once, in a small spot the librarian must have missed. But at what point were the doings of Mrs. Astor & Billie Burke considered the proper province of young minds in North Cowichan? The book is limp with use at any rate, so perhaps it acted as inspiration for a hard-drinking, sarcastic junior mid-Island smart set in the early 50's. But at some point the pearls and cigarette holders weren't cutting it anymore & the discard stamp just confirmed what everybody knew...