Nash, Ogden. I Couldn’t Help Laughing

Stories selected & introduced by Ogden Nash. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1957.  First Edition. Inscribed via an original poem to Nash’s friend and publishing colleague George Stevens. I don’t fight the gods, I shudder at odds, I much prefer evens – Hi, George Stevens! Stevens was a longtime book publisher, writer and editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.  Stevens and Nash first met at Doubleday Doran, where Nash worked in the advertising department.  It was at Doubleday, as he faced Stevens across their desks, that Nash began scrawling brief verses on pieces of yellow paper and pitching them over to his friend.  As George Stevens reminisced on his and Nash’s life during Prohibition, “It was the era of the ignoble experiment, and we ignored the law in each other’s society more than once. We used to go to Yankee Stadium to see Babe Ruth in his greatest year and the Yankees in theirs. In May we drove to Mineola and saw The Spirit of St. Louis a few days before her pilot too