Scouts in Bondage: And Other Violations of Literary Propriety

Michael Bell, an antiquarian book dealer from Lewes, England, presents fifty vintage books whose titles and content will either puzzle or amuse the contemporary reader. Here are double-entendres aplenty, from the titular Scouts in Bondage by Geoffrey Prout, to older children's novels such as

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Bertram Smith's Totty: The Truth about Ten Mysterious Terms and Bessie Marchant's How Nell Scored. Here too are the unintentionally hilarious non-fiction titles, like Stephen J. Williams' Welsh in a Week or Clare Goslett's Simple Hints for Mothers on the Home Sex-Training of Boys.

Good for a laugh, Scouts in Bondage and Other Literary Improprieties is a slim little book, and can be "read" in less than half-an-hour. Almost entirely given over to images, the reader will enjoy paging through, alternating between puzzled head-scratching and helpless giggling. Those who collect and read vintage children's books will probably find this little collection particularly amusing.

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One need not carve out a great deal of time for this slight browse, which presents a choice of book covers (and a few excerpts) from a bookshop which contains a subcollection of books with amusing titles, often double-entendres, or, less often, odd resonances in the juxtaposition of author and

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title. Some are amusing, some are headscratchers, and many, I suspect, are decipherable only to those with a working knowledge of British slang; I caught a few. It's a pleasant enough browse; I'd allow twenty minutes.

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This book think it's a whole lot funnier than it is. It's also possible it's getting laughs based on outdated slang I'm not familiar with. I think page 44 was the only one I got a good chuckle out of. That said, it also took me maybe five minutes to read, so it's got that going for it.