Awful Library Books

Awful Library Books is a collection of amusing and/or questionable library holdings found in real libraries and curated by librarians Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner. Today’s post is the book New York Confidential: The Big City After Dark (Lait and Mortimer, 1948), contains such advice as:

Smart Gotham gals don’t keep diaries. If what does into ’em is unimportant, why bother? If it’s secret stuff, never put it in writing.

Do NOT walk in Central Park or other parks AFTER DARK, even if escorted.

Do not use cheap perfume when night clubbing (or any other time).

Gals who pass out after five (or 55) drinks should wear identification bracelets with name and address — especially when on a first date with a gent who may not know where to deliver the body.

Don’t invite gents who call for you into your apartment. Have them meet you below. If they once get in, they may decide they’ll stay a while, smoke your cigarettes, drink all your liquor, raid your ice box, and then if you won’t give in, they won’t buy you dinner.

Obviously a must-have for any modern library. Other books found in the stacks include How to Good-bye Depression: If you constrict anus 100 times everyday. Malarkey? Or Effective Way?, Why Cats Paint: a theory of feline aesthetics and Latawnya, the Naughty horse, learns to say “no” to drugs.