Evil Through the Ages: An Outline of Indecency

New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1932. 2nd printing before publication. Hardcover. [minor shelfwear only, slight age-toning to edges of text block; the jacket has a few nicks along the edges, with very shallow chipping at both ends of the spine]. (cartoon illustrations) A satirical, mock-scientific swipe at the Puritanical mindset, presented as a series of lectures by an unnamed professor to explain . A jacket blurb by Clarence Budington Kelland declares the author to be "much more amusing than Huxley, vastly funnier than Darwin, and though not so screamingly funny as H.G. Wells [whose "An Outline of History" the book's subtitle alludes to], nevertheless quite the most hilarious scientific voice ever raised in America," although he does allow that "Einstein outdoes him when it comes to personal appearance." Although trained as an architect (and for a time the architectural critic for The New Yorker), Chappell also had an active career as a writer for Vanity Fair and other publications, and between 1920 and 1933 published about a dozen books of satirical humor, ranging from mock travelogues to skewerings of New York society; a number of these were published under the noms de plume "Walter E. Traprock" and "William Hogarth Jr." Otto Soglow's hilarious drawings -- depicting such sinful events as "The Dawn of the Sex-Idea" and "Nudism Under Charles II" -- are extravagantly praised in rear jacket-flap blurbs by a Who's Who of cartoonists and illustrators of the day: James Montgomery Flagg, Rube Goldberg, H.T. Webster, James Thurber, and Milt Gross. .