A Spoof to Remember

THE DAY NOTHING HAPPENED (59 pp.) --Corey Ford--Doubleday ($1.50).

It was Thursday in New York, a day like other days perhaps, but this day seemed to have a special tantalizing humdrum something. This was not the day Lincoln was shot or Normandy was invaded, not the day Pearl Harbor was bombed or Fort Sumter was fired on. What this day was (and few would know it until it moved to its inexorable climax) was the most uneventful Thursday in American history.

In its title. The Day Nothing Happened telegraphs the gentle punch that Humorist Corey Ford (Has Anybody Seen Me Lately? Never Say Diet) has aimed at the current publishing mania for Day books. He parodies the pompous epiphenomena that accompany such ventures, including the introductory note of martyred scholarship, the bow of punctilio to humble assistants ("My thanks to Mr. F. L. Peters at the Information Booth at Grand Central"). And there is the jacket blurb from a fellow authority in the field: "'The most exciting twenty-four hours since the day I shot Jim Bishop'--A. Lincoln."

What did not happen on Thursday? Well, LeRoy Goss missed the 8:09 New York local from Bronxville. Any doubt that the train may have left is banished by a well-preserved photo of the empty tracks of the New York Central (looking south). Later that day the hapless Goss would fail to heed his wife's injunction to buy parakeet food. And so it goes. All in all, as Poe would say, a most immemorial day--and a satire to remember, at least for a few days.

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