Snobs, A Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues and Yourself
Lynes, Russell. Snobs, A Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues and Yourself. First Edition. 1950. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in very good minus condition—jacket shows light soiling and minor tears. Drawings by Robert Osborn.
Though published in 1950, this classic study of snobbery remains surprisingly fresh because the world has changed far more than the people in it. The book argues that while egalitarianism may have diminished traditional social snobbery, it has spawned countless new varieties in its place: cultural, intellectual, regional, moral, and otherwise. The details change, but the impulse remains the same. Even those who pride themselves on their tolerance are not exempt, for they often feel superior to the narrow-minded. Lynes’s tongue-in-cheek conclusion is both amusing and unsettling: snobbery is not a social defect afflicting other people. It is a universal human tendency, and we are all guilty of it.
“In Texas it is said that you should never ask a man where he comes from. ‘If he’s a Texan,’ they say, ‘he’ll tell you. If he’s not, don’t embarrass him.”
--Russell Lynes