Washington Post Book World column

Washington Post
February 28, 1982
Book World, page BW15

BOOK REPORT
By Michelle Slung

DOGS AND CATS

THERE USED TO BE a publishing joke, to the effect that the perfect mix of ingredients for a best-selling book would begin and end with the title Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog. Doctors are still “in,” but maybe not so much as they used to be, before one of their number got murdered, and canines have been supplanted by felines. As for Lincoln, well, for a while, anyway, he had to take a back seat to the Nixon industry. Yet that hasn’t stopped one young writer, Richard Grayson, from calling his latest book exactly that—Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog and Other Stories.

To be published in early May by Maryland’s White Ewe Press, it will join that column in Books in Print which features, among others, Lincoln’s Favorite Poets and Lincoln’s Religion, and perhaps in time a few ardent Lincoln scholars will find themselves ordering it by mistake. If so, they will encounter this sentence in the title story: “Lincoln’s doctor’s dog’s mother was a bitch.”

Meanwhile, in a contemporary variation on the same idea, Berkley-Jove has scheduled for next summer a trade paperback whose time may not have come and gone by then, The Preppy Cat. If that makes you want to stone the author responsible, you might find yourself hounded—excuse me—by the ASPCA, because the book is being listed as by Leland Stanford Cat VIII. In addition, Holt, Rinehart is proposing to bring out The Joy of Stuffed Preppies in the early spring. Here again, the authors are hiding behind fictitious identities, publishing as Randall C. Douglas III and Eric Fowler. The title, for sure, is open to a number of interpretations, and they’re probably right to protect themselves.