399. Fake Book Reading List

July 10, 2025

Q. For some odd reason, since the last presidential election, I can’t stop thinking about WB Yeats “The Second Coming” (the one that includes the lines: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”) Perhaps it is the line “The worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Anyway, I have a vivid memory of what I believe was a Lampoon one-page piece—a fake book club ad, or a best seller list—in which every book title was a phrase or line from that poem. The book titled “The Center Cannot Hold” was a memoir by an NFL offensive lineman, for example. But I have been unable to locate which issue it was in, and AI-assisted searches have failed me utterly. Can you help?

A. Wow. I actually found it, and it wasn’t that hard. I did a text search on the PDFs from the National Lampoon Complete DVD-ROM, which is often kind of useless, especially if the search terms are ordinary words. But “center cannot hold” worked, showing up in only one issue: July 1981 (“Endless, Mindless Summer Sex”) in the “Nonfiction” sidebar accompanying the article “Would You Like Something to Read?” by Sean Kelly and Ted Mann. It fits your description to a T.

Comments

Prompted by this comment, I read this piece, which was really well-done and I had completely overlooked. I wanted to point out an earlier version of the same concept, in the great and ambitious February '77 Kennedy Fifth Term Inaugural Issue. An ad for the "New Frontier Book Club" shows a standing series of book jackets. I was intrigued by the book titles and randomly searched a couple, only to find that when strung together they form a single, long sentence from Kennedy's actual inaugural.

—Robert Leighton

September 6, 2025 5:53 pm

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