Female Etiquette

Here in the English Department, we have a table in the hallway with a sign over it announcing "Free Books." Anybody can put books there that they don't want, and anybody who's interested is welcome to take them. There are usually a lot of old composition texts, old anthologies, and dog-eared paperback classics like Lord Jim, The Mayor of Casterbridge, or The Works of Goethe. It's a popular place because English majors are always interested in building their libraries.

I've put a few books there myself, and being the book lover I am, I can't help but stop and look when I see that someone has weeded their library. Usually, it's nothing of interest or something I already have. But not today. No, sir. Today, I snagged this beauty:

No Nice Girl Swears by Alice-Leone Moats, copyright 1933. It's a conduct book, and if the title makes you laugh, look at the chapter headings:

1. No Nice Girl Swears
2. Should She Ask Him In?
3. You're the First Man I've Ever Kissed
4. Keeping an Amateur Standing
5. This Casual Era
6. May I Call You Up Some Time?
7. Out for No Good
8. Joining In
9. Launching a Belle
10. Chaperons Do Exist
11. Between Courses
12. The Inevitable Details
13. Lunches and Teas; or, Scarcely Worth the Trouble
14. Coming Out to Music
15. Cutting In and Sitting Out
16. That Certain Something
17. The Great Step
18. In a Cloud of Tulle
19. Twice Shy--?
20. Travel Broadens the Mind
21. Never Speak to Strangers Unless They Speak to You
22. Out of Town
23. Summer, Winter, Spring
24. An Old English Custom
25. In a Strange Bed
26. Pity the Poor Working Girl
27. Serious Business
28. Hot Footlights
29. The Hiccuping Fifties
30. Our Plastered Friends

No, I'm not making this up. If it hadn't been published in 1933, I'd assume that at least some of those chapter titles were intended as double-entendres. And I can't help but wonder whose library this came from.

I'm thinking this book deserves to be prominently displayed in my office.