Finally available after thirty years, MARCHING TO SHIBBOLETH collects all the words (and sound effects) to Firesign's favorite audio comedies of the Seventies, including Waiting For the Electrician; How Can You Be In Two Places At Once; Nick Danger; Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers; I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and The Giant Rat of Sumatra. MARCHING TO SHIBBOLETH, now under the imprint of Bear Manor Books, reproduces both of Firesign's "Big Books," originally published in 1972 and 1974 by Straight Arrow. Designed by Jon Goodchild and Richard Silverstein, the texts are full of photographs, collages and weirdly cool typography typical of High Seventies Style. Phil Proctor edited the visuals and David Ossman the album transcripts for Firesign. Alan Rinzler was editor for Straight Arrow. Both books have been collector's items for a couple of decades. Collecting both under one cover puts the best known Firesign works together for the first time and provides readers with the unique word-for-word wordplay which was often confusing - er, confused with that of James Joyce during Firesign's heyday. The four major titles - Electrician, How Can You Be, Dwarf and Bozos collectively present Firesign's prescient look at technology, the media, American history and paranoia (especially in the classic "Beat The Reaper " gameshow.) The Giant Rat is their tribute to British "Goon Show" humor and Nick Danger, Third Eye has become the classic send-up of both the "noir" detective story and Golden Age radio.

It's finally happened. Boots for industry presents: the only book you'll Ever need about the past/present/future masters of American satire. The utterly futile yet complete history of The Firesign Theatre and its complete recording history is bundled together in one too-large book!

Danger is Firesign's take on the hard-boiled detective character, with firstperson narration and crazy adventures that often involve mistaken identity, and of course there's always a dangerous dame. The skits spoof the conventions of those old detective radio shows, right down to the special effects, the sponsors, the on-air host, the convoluted plots, and just about anything else that one might have heard on a classic serial. "The Beatles of comedy." -Library of Congress "The Firesign Theatre is a comedy group that uses the recording studio at least as brilliantly as any rock group ..." -Robert Christgau ..". [Firesign is] the funniest team in America today, combining elements of W C Fields, James Joyce, Lord Buckley, contemporary television and Thirties radio, scrambling it all up in a collective consciousness that defies description, and then spewing it out in a free-form half-hour epic presentation of sheer insanity ... Their timing is dynamite, their dialog kaleidoscopic, and their satire is, so to speak, acidic. WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN ... a masterpiece of paranoia." -Ed Ward, Rolling Stone

Jake Blake is a private detective short on cash when he meets a rich and beautiful young woman looking to escape her father’s smothering influence. Unfortunately for Jake, the smothering influence includes two thugs hired to protect her—and the woman is in fact not the daughter of the man she wants to escape, but his wife. Now Jake has two angry thugs and one jealous husband on his case. As Jake becomes more deeply involved with this glamorous and possibly crazy woman, he becomes entangled in a web of deceit, intrigue—and multiple murders. Brilliant, sardonic, and full of surprises, Wild Wives is one wild ride.

Blacks and whites during the summer of 1918 in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as our greatest cultural critic. Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission. Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.