Poets Ranked by Beard Weight: The Commemorative Edition

Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a tongue-in-cheek classic of Edwardian esoterica, a privately printed leaflet offered by subscription to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for the reading bins and cocktail tables of parlor cars, and smoking lounges of gentlemen’s clubs. Typifying a once-popular but nowadays seldom-encountered species of turn-of-the-century ephemera, it has become a rarity much prized by bibliophiles. See how the beards of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau stack up against those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Also includes: Fundamentals of Beard Flirtation, in which readers learn the etiquette and code of beard poses and gestures; fortune-telling through beard-reading (pogonomancy); beard-based folklore and controversies (“Public Statues: Dignitaries or Dust Catchers?”)

Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881-1937), was a deipnosophist, clubman, and literary miscellanist with a special interest in tonsorial subjects. His masterpiece, The Language of the Beard, an epicurean treat confected for the delectation of fellow bon vivants, vaunts the premise that the texture, contours, and growth patterns of a man's beard indicate personality traits, aptitudes, and strengths and weaknesses of character.

Gilbert Alter-Gilbert is a critic, translator, and literary historian whose recent publications include the grim anthology Life and Limb and an English-language edition of Vicente Huidobro's Manifestos Manifest. An "experimental classicist", Alter-Gilbert is an inveterate practitioner of fictive history, a genre pioneered by such illustrious forebears as Marcel Schwob and Raymond Roussel.

Jack Passion is an American rock musician, author, entrepreneur, and folk hero. He is also the reigning World Beard and Mustache Champion in the Full Beard Natural category. Passion is the author of The Facial Hair Handbook. He is reputed to live in either San Francisco or Walnut Creek, California.

Mahendra Singh is an artist and illustrator. His projects include illustrating the Melville House edition of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. He lives in Montréal, Quebec.