Squire Haggard's Journal

Hutchinson of London, 1975. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 1975 FIRST EDITION hardcover. Illustrated cover boards with no jacket, as issued. Nice UNREAD COPY inside and out, with sharp edges and corners. Unmarked pages, firm binding. Minimal dust smudging at page edges. Pages very lightly age-tanned. Nice copy overall, uncommon thus. 128 pages. Classic ribald fiction; a hilarious legend of a novel. "Michael Green’s parody of an 18th-century diary plays with conventions recognizable from Pepys or Boswell: the chronicle of daily expenses, strange things eaten, and whores indulged. The cheap, brutal, drunk and corpulent Squire also records the local deaths, from 'Griping of the Guts' and 'the Windy Spasms' to the 'Spasmodick Rumblings.' Detested by his tenants and his hectoring wife, Amos Haggard relies on the good marriage of his son—a dim and horny Oxford student—to solve his financial troubles. Instead, the two find themselves on a transcontinental debauch, paying their way by cheating at cards and winning contests at belching and expectorating. Baron von Munchausen, Lafayette, and Samuel Johnson make cameo appearances—the last stealing from Haggard a few of his best lines.