Ho Hum

Above, two pages from Ho Hum: Newsbreaks from The New Yorker (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931), foreword by E. B. White, illustrations by O. Soglow. A newsbreak is a New Yorker specialty, a snippet of journalism containing “some error of typography or judgment,” as White puts it, used to fill extra space at a column’s end. White selected newsbreaks for many years. Mira Ptacin’s account of a visit to White’s Maine house includes a photograph of a list of newsbreak categories, still tacked to the wall of White’s writing shed.

By the way, the Billboard item must have been placed by a carnival geek. Billboard ran geek ads in its carnival section.

Related reading
All E. B. White posts (Pinboard)
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY” (Billboard ads)

[I still marvel at the generosity of libraries. If this book were mine, I wouldn’t let it out.]