{"product_id":"2940014043618","title":"FABLES IN SLANG (Illustrated)","description":"By adopting the Aesopian form, with its frequent use of capital letters—thus contrasting the very old with the very new—George Ade invested his text with an element in humor so novel that it is sure to have many clumsy imitators.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe chief merit of the \"Fables in Slang\" does not lie in its form, but in the manner which it is contained. Ade is as genuine a humorist as the country can boast of, and thoroughly understands the fundamental law that nothing is really funny which is not founded on the truth. His manner of telling his little stories is amusing enough to provoke the reader to almost constant laughter, and a great many unthinking persons doubtless think that the humorist who can accomplish this result has reached the limit of his art. But true humor is something more than the mere juggling of words, and long after George Ade's book has been laid aside we find ourselves thinking\" of the amazing amount of truth that lies hidden in it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \"The Fable of the New York Person who Gave the Stage Fright to Fostoria, Ohio,\" we have the story of a young man whom we all know. He hails from the metropolis, and, as Mr. Ade truthfully observes in the moral of his fable, he \"never begins to Cut Ice until he is west of Rahway.\" This young man paid a visit to a cousin in Fostoria, demanded artichokes for dinner, and wanted to know if there was a manicure parlor in the \"beastly hole.\" He attended the annual dinner of the bicycle club, and left early because the man next him put ice in his claret. When the manager of the local hub and spoke factory invited him to drink, he remarked that the wine was hardly as dry as he usually got it at Martin's. At this, according to Mr. Ade, \"the club members looked at him and said nothing; they thought he meant Bradley Martin's.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn short, as Mr. Ade would express it, the young New Yorker threw a great bluff during his stay in Fostoria; but when the Ohio cousin visited the metropolis a few weeks later, and sought out his urban relative, he found him living in a very queer boarding house, and \"that Evening they went to Proctor's and stood during the Performance.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the sketch of the \"Specialty Team\" we find a wonderfully graphic picture of two variety actors who played the same thing for seventeen years with only two changes in all that time; one in their seventh year, when one of them changed his whiskers from green to blue, and another in their fourteenth year, when they bought a new \"slap stick\" and put a card in the Clipper, warning the public to beware of imitators. These artists could not understand why the public \"stood for Mansfield\" when it could get them; and once, when the manager of a variety show shut them off from public view at the very beginning of their sketch, they accounted for his act on the ground that he was \"Mansfield's Friend, and Mansfield was out with his Hammer.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMr. Ade's work rings true in every line, and is worthy of serious study for its portrayals of certain forms of contemporaneous life, for its genuine humor, and also for its slang. This last is the very newest known to our language, and not that which Thackeray heard when he went down the Bowery —which is still doing service in the work of some of our writers of today.","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47073860419824,"sku":"2940014043618","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014043618_p0.jpg?v=1763599570","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014043618","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}