PREFACE

The success of the Toaster’s Handbook has encouraged its publishers to compile another that will supplement it and bring it up-to-date.  New subjects keep coming to the front, and the up-to-date toaster needs up-to-date stories to fit the up-to-date subjects.  No public occasion of today is complete without its joke on the nineteenth amendment, the allied debts, the income tax, etc.

In offering the toasts, jokes, quotations and stories in this second volume, the editor has endeavored to bring further aid to the distracted toastmaster, to the professional after-dinner speaker who must change his stories often, and to individuals inexperienced in public speaking and so unfortunate as to have public addresses forced upon them.  He views the product with much the same feeling as did Alexander Pope, who said, “O’er his books his eyes began to roll, in pleasing memory of all he stole.”

Paolo Bellezze expressed the same feelings in the introduction to his work “Humor” when he said “Of this work of mine, I must confess it is a great lot of stuff gathered from everywhere except from my brain....  It is a necklace of pearls strung upon a slender cord; that, I have put there; the pearls have been furnished me by the most famous jewelers, native and foreign.  This said, I can—­without being accused of pride—­recommend it to my respectable customers as an article of great value and of absolute novelty.”

In making this collection, files of such magazines as Life, Judge, Puck and Punch were drawn on extensively; also magazines having humorous pages or columns, such as the Literary Digest, Ladies’ Home Journal, Everybody’s, Harper’s; also Bindery Talk and various other house organs.  According to Samuel Johnson “A man will turn over half a library to make one book,” and the compiler of this one makes humble acknowledgment to a whole library of books and periodicals where most of these jokes have already appeared.  It has been impossible to give credit unless the place of first publication was definitely known.

The compiling of “More Toasts” was in large measure cooperative.  The test of the humor of a story or joke is in its efficacy when applied to normal people under ordinary circumstances.  With this philosophy in mind the editor made it a rule to include nothing until it had first been “tried on the dog.”  The original material was first graded into three classes and, before being accepted, each joke had to stand the test of appealing to the sense of humor of several persons.  The result is a collection of very carefully selected jokes and stories, only about fifty per cent of the material originally chosen being used.  If any over-critical reader fails to find them humorous, may not the fault possibly be due to his own imperfect sense of humor?

There is also much truth in the statement that the point of a jest lies in the telling of it and often much of the subtle humor is lost in the reading.  The personality of the speaker is a necessary factor and is frequently more important in the effect produced by the story than the story itself.  Elbert Hubbard once said “Next in importance to the man who first voices a great thought is the man who quotes it.”