Some mild reading creases on spine. Some slight edgewear and a couple of minor stains, otherwise clean and tight. Talking uncommon good sense while apparently playing the fool has been the unwritten law of jesters from time imemorial. Ogden Nash is no stranger to this kind of performance, and has delighted many thousands of readers with it on both sides of the Atlantic. The Private Dining Room perhaps shows a jester within a jester (if such were possible), for Nash, listening to "conversation", translates it into his own inimitable style - making gnomic epigrams, inventing bathos with just sufficient ballast to keep it safely afloat, turning the chance remark into observation that wittily interprets family life in general, sparking out brilliant asides on natural history; all of which proves him at one with Shakespeare's Feste that "he wears not motley in his brain".

Poetry