The Hatless Man: An Anthology of Odd & Forgotten Manners

Front Cover
Viking, 1995 - Humor - 191 pages
"Gathered together here - in one volume - is the best of bad behavior: more than 700 of the most irate, emphatic, amusing condemnations of impropriety, called from nearly 200 etiquette books, ranging from the fourteenth century to the present." "If you thought that books of decorum contained only dull, dry rules of good behavior, think again. The business of etiquette has as much to do with the wrong as with the right. Now a procession of characters - from etiquette's grande dames to its flustered beginners teetering on the brink of misbehavior - has been brought to rollicking life in thirty-five drawings by one of the great artistic wits of our century, Ronald Searle." "Etiquette authors did not confine their advice solely to decorum. They digressed into all manner of self-improvement, making etiquette manuals the self-help books of the past and The Hatless Man as topical today as when its rules were written. The Hatless Man is not just for lovers of propriety, but for people in all situations in which confusions of behavior may arise. It supplies nuggets of advice for almost everybody: dieters, gluttons, waiters, wallflowers, psychiatrists, dogs, spouses, athletes, musicians, lawyers, commuters, tourists, or simply for lovers of time travel who want to spend some moments luxuriating in the lost era of carriage rides and shooting parties. It is the perfect gift for Christmas, for weddings, for anniversaries - a gift for all occasions that will last for years to come."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From inside the book

Contents

Chapter
1
Chapter
15
Chapter 3
23
Copyright

7 other sections not shown

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About the author (1995)

Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge, England on March 3, 1920. At the age of 15, he paid for his own art school classes by working for a cartoonist at The Cambridge Daily News. In 1939 he passed a government drafting test and joined the Army as an architectural draftsman. During this time, he also made impressionistic watercolor sketches of fellow soldiers and cartoons poking fun at military conventions. His work was first published in the magazine Lilliput in 1941. During the war, he was captured by the Japanese and sent to Changi prison, which provided forced labor for building the Burma railway. He recorded the deplorable conditions of his camp and the fates of fellow soldiers by drawing with crude implements and scraps of paper. After he was released in 1945, his drawings were exhibited in Cambridge and were later published in 1986 as a book entitled To the Kwai - and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945. In 1948, he began writing and illustrating parodies about the students at a fictional English girls' school called St. Trinian's and publishing them in Lilliput. This led to a series of popular books, which included Hurrah for St. Trinian's, The Terror of St. Trinian's, and The St. Trinian's Story. His other books included Searle's Cats, The Square Egg, Hello - Where Did All the People Go?, The Secret Sketchbook, and More Cats. He also drew illustrations for numerous magazines and newspapers including The New Yorker, TV Guide, Le Monde, Life magazine, The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune. He died on December 30, 2011 at the age of 91.

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