A Manly Old Guide to the Ivy League

Eric Hoover:

If your college guide says nothing about finding dates or getting laid, your college guide is woefully incomplete.

I reached that conclusion while thumbing through an entertaining old book my editor plucked on a whim from The Chronicle’s library this summer. With its drab, tattered cover, The Ivy League Guidebook, published in 1969, looks as inviting as a frat-basement couch.

But the pages within hold treasures, like this sentence: “With over twenty-five thousand young ladies attending one college or another in the Boston area, there is many a fertile field for the sowing of wild oats.” And this one: “When an Ivy Leaguer or a girl who has dated in the Ivy League thinks of a Dartmouth man, he or she does not call to mind a thin, pale, introspective boy with thick glasses sitting rapt in an obscure corner of the biology laboratory reading about the sex life of a mushroom.”