Nuts to Crack

A thousand jokes, epigrams, puns and university anecdotes collected by a Cambridge bookseller who heard most of them across his own counter. The book is a cross-section of what an English university found funny in 1834: dons and undergraduates, bishops and duns, and the perpetual war between town and gown. Some of it has not aged at all; a good deal of it has, and that is most of the interest. Fifty-seven plates, from Turner to Munch, catch the same comedy of courts, nurses and moonlight that the dons and undergraduates traded across the counter.