The Smoker’s Year Book

The Smoker’s Year Book is a 1908 comic gift book by Oliver Herford (1860-1935), the American wit and illustrator, written with John Cecil Clay. The book runs through the calendar months with verses and drawings on the pleasures of tobacco, the pipe, the cigar, and the cigarette, in the mock-celebratory manner of the Edwardian smoking literature produced when tobacco was an unembarrassed gentleman’s ritual. Herford and Clay collaborated on several of these ornamental gift volumes, with Clay’s decorative draughtsmanship complementing Herford’s verse. The book is a period piece of pre-war American club culture, of interest now for its illustration and as social history of the smoking age. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.