Up in Thurber's Attic

CREDOS AND CURIOS (180 pp.)--James Thurber--Harper & Row ($3.95).

The death of every major author, James Thurber wrote, is followed by the arrival at his door of a literary executor, who will drink his Scotch, mouse around his attic for a year or more, then cart off all his old laundry tickets, racing forms and telephone numbers for a posthumous volume. Anticipating this raggedy sort of immortality, Thurber once poked through his papers and. in The Notebooks of James Thurber, listed seven deterrents to their publication: "persistent illegibility, paucity of material, triviality of content, ambiguity of meaning, facetious approach, preponderance of juvenilia and exasperating abbreviation." In this volume of hitherto uncollected sketches, essays and profiles, only the problems of illegibility and abbreviation have been solved.

The collection includes everything from introductions to cartoon books to patter for Playboy, 21 pieces in all, some more than 30 years old. The Notebooks is the best piece, precisely because it tells, in strong, wry Thurber talk, why the rest should not have been printed at all. Only Thurberphiles who want to have his "complete oeuvre" on their shelves will welcome the book, and oeuvre, after all, is a word that would have left Thurber annoyed and embarrassed.

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