by Benjamin Franklin

Modern Library, 108 pp., $10.95 (paper)

“I firmly believe that early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man miss pretty much everything good on TV,” Dave Barry decides in his introduction to this most recent incarnation of Poor Richard’s Almanack, one-fourth of the Modern Library’s Humor & Wit series (S.J. Perelman, Mark Twain, and Nora Ephron are Franklin’s colleagues in the series). Poor Richard’s Almanack contains much of Franklin’s famous wit (“All would live long, but none would be old”) but at this late date, the wit sometimes makes for a more intriguing reading than Franklin may have intended (for those of you with wax heads, Franklin has this advice: “If your head is wax, don’t walk in the Sun”). Wit and Wisdom From Poor Richard’s Almanack lBenjamin Franklin

This article appears in December 1 • 2000.

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