Gilbert Seldes’ brilliantly titled “The Stammering Century” is all about the various frauds, fools, cranks, mountebanks and eccentrics who devised and populated the religious and social cults of the 19th century. The book was published in 1928, so it was all reasonably fresh as Seldes was doing his research.

Since the cult has apparently replaced the family as the cohesive social unit — see everything from Hubbard, L. Ron to Rand, Ayn — Seldes’ book is, one might say, eternally relevant.

Seldes had already published “The Seven Lively Arts” four years earlier, so he was a known quantity, but “The Stammering Century” is a funny, audacious book. It takes on Christian Science, Spiritualism, Prohibition, the Oneida community and all the other deranged attempts to build a perfect heaven right here on this grievously faulty earth.

A mark of the book’s quality is that neither the style nor the point of view has dated; it’s as fresh as human naivete, as eternal as religiosity.

The new paperback published by the New York Review of Books features an excellent introduction by the estimable Greil Marcus. Other than the fact that the publishers didn’t bother to reset the archaic typeface, the book resonates beautifully.

In the Pipeline…

Sam Roberts of The New York Times will write a book for Simon & Schuster entitled “A History of New York in 100 Objects,” expanded from a Times piece that focused on only 50 objects. Roberts is quite busy; his book about Grand Central Station will be published next month by Grand Central … Crown will publish Damion Searls’ “The Inkblot Experiment,” about the life and work of Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychiatrist who invented the the inkblot test to illustrate some of the unconscious drives of his patients.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

somniloquist: someone who talks in their sleep.

Quote Unquote…

“Wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonor or foregone without misery.”

— George Bernard Shaw