Book Review: It All Started with Nudes

Title: It All Started with Nudes

(Amazon had a good clear image of this book's cover but, since it's a cartoon of a nude figure, this web site has chosen to use a truncated, blurry one instead. Click on it to see what the jacket drawing really looks like.)

Author: Richard Armour

Date: 1977

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

ISBN: 0-07-002271-2

Length: 158 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Campbell Grant

Quote: “Since it was hard to hang a picture on the walls of a rocky cave, the Stone Age artist wisely drew pictures on the walls instead.”

Do readers remember Richard Armour? He was America’s family humorist during the mid-twentieth century Best known for short light verses, many of which appeared in Parade (“Shake and shake the ketchup bottle. None’ll come, and then a lot’ll”), he’d written fifty-four books before this one. Seven of those books were jocular looks at history, with almost one joke per line and with titles beginning with It All Started with...In alphabetical order, his historical studies started with Columbus, Europa, Eve, Freshman English, Hippocrates, Marx, and Stones and Clubs: studies of North America, Europe, gender, literature, medicine, politics, and war.

Armour did research for these books, although he wrote them like stand-up comedy scripts. Those facts that weren’t obviously turned into jokes were said to be perfectly accurate. Teachers encouraged students to use the jokes to help remember the facts in passages like:

“According to Herodotus, it took one hundred thousand men twenty years to build the great Pyramid of Khufu. Whether the architect was still alive to collect his fee is not known.”

“The Romans invented mosaics. These were more complementary to building than many Roman portraits were complimentary to their subjects.”

“Leonardo...invented a flying machine and would have been ahead of the Wright Brothers if he had possessed one essential part—some sort of engine."

“El Greco painted religious themes religiously, but his Cardinal Guevara brings out all the meanness and cruelty of this head man of the Inquisition If the Cardinal saw his portrait and failed to have El Greco executed, he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all....He is wearing glasses in the portrait.”

“Thomas Jefferson” [invented] “the swivel chair and the dumb waiter (not the human kind).”

If his comedy could become predictable, at least Armour kept it clean. Despite the cartoon of the nude blonde on the cover, there’s not a rude word and hardly a smutty thought in this book. It All Started with Nudes would not have been a good gift for my grandmothers, who didn’t think even cartooned nudes belonged on the front covers of books, but many people who are active grandmothers now would find it nostalgically sweet and oldfashioned.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address (details are in the "Greeting" post). Four of Armour's "It All Started With" books would fit into one $5 package.