Found While Idling Away the Morning with Coffee in the Back Garden

In the October 4th number of The New Yorker:

In the first years of this magazine, technology was only a modest factor in its production. Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker and its first editor, often roamed the Algonquin and pressed his friends, the hotel’s literary habitués, to, well, write something. He was an editor acquainted with the nightmare of the empty page, the blank magazine. Once, when he asked Dorothy Parker why she wasn’t in the office writing, she replied, "Someone was using the pencil."

I was delighted to find that there is a Dorothy Parker Society and equally disappointed to view their web pages. Too anachronistic. And too silly. Dorothy Parker T-shirts? Eh, no.

On the other hand, there is a Robert Benchley Society that seemed worth a look. Oddly, though, no James Thurber Society that google can find. And, not surprisingly, no Alexander Woollcott Society. Who, indeed, remembers Woollcott? Nothing seems to be in print. The library found a couple of his for me last year but no one seemed to have touched them in decades. The librarian had never heard of him. Maybe if I searched for a Sheridan Whiteside Society. . . .