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.

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