The Rubáiyát of Bridge

A gleeful literary prank from the golden age of American humor. Wells takes the solemn, meditative quatrains of Omar Khayyam's 'Rubáiyát', those whispered verses about wine, fate, and the mystery of existence, and applies them to something far less cosmic: the card game that drove early 20th-century society to distraction. The result is a collection of mock-profound bridge wisdom that reads like a fortune cookie written by a woman who just lost a rubber to her brother-in-law. Each quatrain addresses a cardinal sin of the bridge table: the partner who never leads trump, the opponent who psychic-bids with a yarborough, the nightmare of watching someone else's misplay cost you the game. 'A Book of Verses underneath the Bough' becomes 'A Book of Tricks upon the Table.' Wells deploys the Persian original's grave cadence to deliver lines like 'You know who ought to lead? Not I! / So pass I will, and let it lie.' The illustrations by May Wilson Preston capture the theatrical despair of players holding cards they cannot bear to see. The joke has outlived its era because bridge players still recognize every disaster Wells catalogues. It's for anyone who's ever stared at a hand they cannot believe is theirs and wondered whether the universe is just.