Fancy a tipple? Then pull up a stool, raise a glass, and dip into this delightful paean to the grand old saloon days of yore. Written by Chicago-based journalist, playwright, and all-round wit George Ade in the waning years of Prohibition, The Old-Time Saloon is both a work of propaganda masquerading as "just history" and a hilarious exercise in nostalgia. Featuring original, vintage illustrations along with a new introduction and notes from Bill Savage, Ade's book takes us back to the long-gone men's clubs of earlier days, when beer was a nickel, the pretzels were polished, and the sardines were free.
Fancy a tipple? Then pull up a stool, raise a glass, and dip into this delightful paean to the grand old saloon days of yore. Written by Chicago-based journalist, playwright, and all-round wit George Ade in the waning years of Prohibition, The Old-Time Saloon is both a work of propaganda masquerading as "just history" and a hilarious exercise in nostalgia. Featuring original, vintage illustrations along with a new introduction and notes from Bill Savage, Ade's book takes us back to the long-gone men's clubs of earlier days, when beer was a nickel, the pretzels were polished, and the sardines were free.
Born and educated in Indiana but a long-time Chicagoan, George Ade (1866?1944) was a prolific journalist, a Broadway playwright, and a humorist whose newspaper columns, Fables in Slangand Stories of the Streets and of the Town, were syndicated nationally, collected in books, and produced as films, some of which Ade directed. Bill Savage is associate professor of instruction in the Department of English at Northwestern University, as well as a bartender emeritus.
"[One of the] 'Books we can't wait to read: The back half of 2016
edition.' . . . In the early twentieth century, Ade was one of the
funniest newspapermen in Chicago. In The Old-Time Saloon,
originally published in the depths of Prohibition, he looks back
with great nostalgia on the glory days of the nineteenth-century
saloon."--Aimee Levitt and Tal Rosenberg "Chicago Reader"
"Ade was an American humorist who wrote literature for daily
newspapers, back when such a thing could be imagined. He wrote
vividly about the middle of the country when it was up-and-coming,
expectedly dowdy and unexpectedly modern--he stands right between
Booth Tarkington and Ring Lardner. And Ade did more for
capitalization than anybody since Swift. . . . He was poet laureate
of the live ones, and a distant ancestor of Rocky and
Bullwinkle."--Luc Sante "HiLobrow"
"Do you have a favorite bar? Perhaps a tavern? Maybe a lounge with
some cozy comforts? Humans have gathered close for a libation or
three for millennia and many wonderful conversations have ensued as
a result. George Ade, noted Chicago journalist, wrote about his own
experiences with such gathering places in his 1931 book The
Old-Time Saloon. Recently, the University of Chicago Press reissued
this delightful tome with thoughtful annotations from Chicago's own
Bill Savage."--Max Grinnell "The Urbanologist"
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