Poets Ranked by Beard Weight: The Commemorative Edition [Paperback]

Upton Uxbridge Underwood (Author), Mahendra Singh (Illustrator), Jack Passion (Introduction), Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (Commentary)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 2011

See how Whitman’s beard stacks up against Wordsworth’s in this classic edition of Poets Ranked by Beard Weight!

Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a tongue-in-cheek classic of Edwardian esoterica, a privately printed leaflet offered by subscription to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for the reading bins and cocktail tables of parlor cars, and smoking lounges of gentlemen’s clubs. Typifying a once-popular but nowadays seldom-encountered species of turn-of-the-century ephemera, it has become a rarity much prized by bibliophiles. See how the beards of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau stack up against those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Also includes: Fundamentals of Beard Flirtation, in which readers learn the etiquette and code of beard poses and gestures; fortune-telling through beard-reading (pogonomancy); beard-based folklore and controversies (“Public Statues: Dignitaries or Dust Catchers?”) 50 black-and-white illustrations

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Everything that can be known about beards and much that can't." --The London Weekly Gazette

"Indispensable. A bible for the bearded!" --Wisps and Tufts

"Underwood's revolutionary syntheses lift the science of pogonology to hitherto undreamed of heights!" --Beards Illustrated

"A work of startling acuity, insight and originality. A breakthrough at the furthest frontiers of scientific progress." --Harrington's

"A comprehensive guide for the man about town and a must-have for every gentleman of cultivated taste. Underwood has done it again!" --Suave

About the Author

Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881-1937), was a deipnosophist, clubman, and literary miscellanist with a special interest in tonsorial subjects. His masterpiece, The Language of the Beard, an epicurean treat confected for the delectation of fellow bon vivants, vaunts the premise that the texture, contours, and growth patterns of a man's beard indicate personality traits, aptitudes, and strengths and weaknesses of character.

Gilbert Alter-Gilbert is a critic, translator, and literary historian whose recent publications include the grim anthology Life and Limb and an English-language edition of Vicente Huidobro's Manifestos Manifest. An "experimental classicist", Alter-Gilbert is an inveterate practitioner of fictive history, a genre pioneered by such illustrious forebears as Marcel Schwob and Raymond Roussel.

Jack Passion is an American rock musician, author, entrepreneur, and folk hero. He is also the reigning World Beard and Mustache Champion in the Full Beard Natural category. Passion is the author of The Facial Hair Handbook. He is reputed to live in either San Francisco or Walnut Creek, California.

Mahendra Singh is an artist and illustrator. His projects include illustrating the Melville House edition of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. He lives in Montréal, Quebec.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing; Cmv edition (October 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1616082453
• ISBN-13: 978-1616082451
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #80,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Underwood's Tragic Obsession, November 11, 2011

By 

Christopher Spranger - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poets Ranked by Beard Weight: The Commemorative Edition (Paperback)

Dear Gilbert Alter-Gilbert,

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your painstaking research into the life and ideas of Upton Uxbridge Underwood--a man so remarkable, so mysterious, and so mellifluously named. Few things are nobler than rescuing some literary oddity from the abyss of history: it is a great and chivalrous deed deserving of the highest praise--and you have rescued not just one but many such oddities, assembling them with exceeding care into a single convenient volume which must delight and astound the literary historian. This latter, as he leafs through the pages of Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, becomes the equivalent of a Columbus, discovering a continent whose existence he never suspected, venturing into a world previously unknown.

As for me: I am just relieved to at last have a psychological explanation of Underwood's troubling beard-obsession, this thanks to your discovery of Cecil Asquith Feverfew's illuminating biography, a work so long lost it was rumored to be nonexistent and came to be sneeringly referred to, in certain scholarly circles, as "the phantom reference."

What Underwood either refused to consider or failed to recognize is that the bearded face is actually in some manner more obscene than the whiskerless one; and for this reason the beard is not the satisfactory veil-substitute his rashness celebrated. Indeed, the serious and distressing problem of facial nudity is one which the beard does not solve but, on the contrary, compounds. Underwood was granted a revelation of the solution, (the veil), but blind to the significance of what he had seen, he neglected it in favor of a wild fancy which, nurtured in the hothouse of his unbalanced head, soon acquired the dimensions of a pathological disorder. The problem of facial nudity can only be solved through the rigid enforcement of a law requiring, sub poena mortis, that all women go veiled and all men vizored--but it necessitated more pragmatism than Underwood possessed to arrive at this conclusion.

The lifework of Underwood, like that of so many men of genius, was no more than a mad dash in the wrong direction, the tragic pursuit of a chimera mistaken for truth.

Yours Sincerely,

C.S.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious, December 16, 2011

By 

Jerry - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poets Ranked by Beard Weight: The Commemorative Edition (Paperback)

This is a really fun read and very different from anything I have ever seen. I laughed so hard my beard fell off!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bard of Beard, December 30, 2011

By 

Gary Kern (NM USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poets Ranked by Beard Weight: The Commemorative Edition (Paperback)

The beard is a serious matter, whether literal or figurative, and should not be treated with dismissive levity, nor is it in this retrieved corpus of pogonosophic investigations, but rather is held up for scholarly examination and appraisal, as befits previously unremarked phenomena in the bardosphere that have long been staring mankind in the face. Whether rightly or wrongly, I declare without fear of contradiction that in no other volume will you find such a realistic description and delightfully dagguerotype depiction of the Singing Beard of Zanzibar or the Bearded Flying Govindas, or the yogi who ascends by his beard, or the unfortunate group who together form the Gordian beard. Nor, I assert, even though I just trimmed my own manhood in front of a mirror, will you find elsewhere such a precise scientific classification and weighing of beards that combines so convincingly the undeniable hirsuteness of great men and their equally undeniable creativity. Whether or not one is ultimately convinced that such an esoteric and quasi-spiritual connection is valid, the high level of discourse and uncommon profusion of neologisms make this a book to hold to one's hairy chest, to share with chimpanzees and to leave secretly on the coffee table for others. Highly recommended for refined literati, spoiled heirs, meta-historians, mystifiers, obscurantists, crackpots, derelicts, street people, silly sillies and gleaming-eyed pundits in the twilight of normal society.