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With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. In 1956, Mencken read through his notebooks and extracted those pieces he thought truest, most pertinent, most precise, or most likely to blow the dust out of a reader's brain.
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b 1 /^^ V l BOOKS BY H. L. Mencken THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE the American language: Supplement One the American language: Supplement Two HAPPY DAYS which, taken together, NEWSPAPER DAYS HEATHEN DAYS A constitute the days OF MENCKEN H. L. NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS TREATISE ON THE GODS CHRISTMAS STORY A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (with selections from the Prejudices lesques, In Defense of Women, series, A Book of Bur- Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong, with pieces from the American Mercury, Smart Set, and Baltimore Evening Sun, and some previously unpublished notes) minority report: H. L. Menckens Notebooks These are Borzoi Books published by Alfred A. Knopf in new york MINORITY REPORT H. L. Menckens Notebooks MINORITY REPORT H. L. Mencken's Notebooks 1956 ALFRED A KNOPF • • NEW YORK L. C. catalog card number: 56-jjij © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956 THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Copyright 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, part of this book in writing may be reproduced in Inc. All rights reserved. from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a Manufactured ously in No any form without permission in the magazine or newspaper. United States of America. Published simultane- Canada by McClelland and Stewart Limited. FIRST EDITION PREFACE This is made up of selecrandom from the memoranda not a book, but a notebook. tions chosen more or less at It is and embalming of ideas. Ever since my earliest attempts as an author I have followed the somewhat banal practise of setting down notions as they come to me, sometimes in the form of hasty scrawls, unintelligible to anyone else, and then throwing these notes into a bin. Out of that bin have come a couple of dozen books and pamphlets and an almost innumerable swarm of magazine and newspaper articles, but still the raw materials kept mounting faster than I could work them up, so I am printing herewith some select samof long years devoted to the pursuit, anatomizing them, partly for the purpose of getting them off my hands and my conscience, and partly in the hope that some of them, at least, may enkindle an occasional reader to ples of more orderly and profitable lucubrations. As I grow older I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme. He should have two at the lowest— one for observ- ing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it