Pucker Up, Don't Blow

For the past few decades I've been accumulating (among other things) bookmarks of many castes, including many fibrous rectangles not created as bookmarks.

Recently I tracked down the provenance of this one.

Turns out that there was a 1934 pamphlet, published in all seriousness, on this topic.  Someone came across it at a garage sale or some such, and pitched it as a camp classic, looking for those who went to the 1974 flick The Great Gatsby, no doubt.

The book was mentioned in the March 20, 1977 New York Times.  The text below:

Osculation. If you were a kid hellbent on becoming a man back in the 1930s, you had a problem: How should you go about exchanging a few goodnight kisses with your date with all the finesse of a Clark Gable taking on a Joan Crawford? The movies offered you few tips, for in those days the Hays Office kept the cameras from peering too close. You might, as thousands of other Depression‐Age kids did, see an ad in a pulp magazine and write to the Franklin Publishing Co. of Philadelphia for a copy of “The Art of Kissing” by one Hugh Morris.

 

Last year Dave Wagner, a Madison, Wis., newspaperman, came across a yellowed copy of the 1936 book at a garage sale. Convinced that “the kisses of love, the only kisses worth considering,” are now on “the endangered list of American customs,” he persuaded Doubleday to reissue it in paperback, with not one word changed, embellished with 45 art deco‐style drawings by Emanuel Schongut.

 

The new edition contains all the step‐by‐step directions a young man—or young woman, for that matter—needs to know to indulge in one of the most pleasant rites of courtship. The publisher categorizes the book as “humor” for its earnestly erudite discussions of kissing games, the French soul kiss, the vacuum kiss, the dancing kiss, the surprise kiss. Feminists may have stronger words for its pronouncements that man “must he the aggressor ... taller than the woman ... for he must give the impression of being his woman’s superior, (mentally and physically).”

 

The book’s republication will be celebrated during lunchtime next Friday at Doubleday’s store on Third Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets. Everyone who buys a copy (at $1.95) will be rewarded with a kiss by one of the two models (male and female) engaged for the occasion. To arms, Americans, to preserve one of our most cherished rites!

... And here's the reissue's cover.  Happy mucous-membrane meetings, fellow smoochers!  See you Thursday.