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"thirty of the baldheaded girls contracted pneumonia and within three months the entire guy kibbee fan club was wiped out. that is only one reason i hesitate to sponsor a fan club. if beri beri or scurvy breaks out in your group how is it going to look?" 5/5

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"and spell guy kibbee in different formations and in different languages, with their little bald heads they were a shiny sight, when the cold weather arrived, however, it was another story, ... 4/5

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"and the girls all shaved their heads to look like their idol, all through the summer the little baldheaded girls had a jolly time, they had guy kibbee meetings, they talked like guy kibbee and when field days were held the fan club would rush out ... 3/5

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"for many years, i have been against fan clubs. i remember back in 1902 a group of girls got together in littleton, new hampshire, to form a guy kibbee fan club. mr. kibbee, even at that early age was as bald as a boy scout's knee... 2/5

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Fred Allen and Guy Kibbee (a story from Fred Allen's Letters). In 1953, two young writers, Ed Simmons and Norman Lear (yes, that one) wrote asking to form a Fred Allen Fan Club. It was meant as a joke and Allen understood it as such. His reply is classic: 1/5

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 24/09/2026

“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in Southern Adventure, the fifth volume of his superb autobiography, The Story of a Life. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life, it’s a memorable excursion. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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At the Green Goose, by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, is a collection of the monologues of Professor Plodsnitch at his favorite pub, the most absurd things to appear in a newspaper before the Irish Times started publishing Flann O'Brien's Cruiskeen Lawn column. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 24/09/2026

You can read all about Detlev's project on his Reading Matter Substack: detlevfischer.substa... 2/2

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 24/09/2026

For over four years, Detlev Fischer has been creating a novel entirely from text sourced from 100 English-language novels published in 1982. He generously shared reflections on six of the less well-known novels he drew upon. neglectedbooks.com/?... 1/2

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23/09/2026

No blurbs for the John Day Co. (in 1927).

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23/09/2026

On this date in 2023, I offered ten #WaferThinBooks (under 150 pages long) of nonfiction selected from the pages of NeglectedBooks.com. I'm pleased to say that two (Malachi Whitaker's And So Did I and Christopher Burney's Solitary Confinement) have since been reissued. waferthinbooks.com/2...

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The Watson Sisters performed for over 50 years, retiring in the early 1950s to the same house in Buffalo where they grew up. Kitty, who married several times, died in 1967; Fanny (at the piano here in a picture from 1959) never married and died in 1970. What a fun rabbit hole! 6/6

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"Boilesk" shows their usual approach. A bit of comic repartee, then Kitty sang the romantic stanza, then Fanny came back on to sing the comic version. You can hear an example on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/... 5/6

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Here's an excerpt from "Boilesk," a 1933 Max Fleischer "Screen Song" short that included a live performance by the Watson Sisters. 4/6

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They did their patriotic duty during World War I, and when fashions changed with the 1920s, so did the Watson Sisters. They were big enough that they made at least one tour of England in the late 1920s. 3/6

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Born in Buffalo, they hit the burlesque circuit around the turn of the century when they were still teens. By the early 1910s, they were headliners, and in 1915 they switched from burlesque to vaudeville (look 'em up: the distinction is lost on us today). 2/6

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Doing some research, I stumbled onto a big half-page ad for an act known as the Watson Sisters from a 1944 issue of Variety. "The One and Only Original" it proclaimed. I had to know more about the Watsons. And what a career they had, I learned. Come, let's wander down this rabbit hole! 1/6

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21/09/2026

Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin (1952). A fascinating portrait of a Puritanical monster who did everything she could to deny material and emotional comfort to her orphan nieces. Grim but gripping. #SpinsterSeptember neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Boy, talk about your entertainment value. Look at all you could get for 15 cents at the City Theatre in New York in 1941. Live acts. The dancing Cityettes. A Radio Band. Molly Picon and the Mills Brothers. Two selected feature movies. Streaming sure sucks in comparison.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21/09/2026

Neglected Circadian Novels: Novels set within a 24-hour period are a mostly post-19th Century phenomenon. There's many more to this sub-genre than just Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. Here are a dozen or so I mentioned in a talk for the British Ass'n for Modernist Studies in 2024 neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21/09/2026

TIL that the Ouija board got its name from... Oui (French) and Ja (German) I suppose you all were just keeping that to yourselves.

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Writing up a short post about this book, I realized that @rlspang.bsky.social probably has much more to say about it than I do. A lively read, but I feel like I missed a bateau full of cultural in-jokes.

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It's true: I don't know how many more I can afford!

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Probably harder to find in the UK (the book, not fire).

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