Well to my great surprise it's still on the market. I bought my copy in 1981 or 1982 when I was in middle school and being preppy was all the rage. Not that I went to prep school or was cool or anything like that, but I still really enjoyed the book. It's so fuuny and yet so accurate. I still have my copy and was thumbing through it the other day, which is what made me wonder what would show up on google.
I have one of those original out-of-print copies that someone was glorifying, but nobody is gonna see it but me b/c I'm not showing anyone those embarassing notes I make as a 12-year-old.
LOL, it's still around.
Preppy is a way of life that can't be adequately explained with words; it has to be experienced for full understanding, but this book comes close. My only quibble is that some of the cars described as properly preppy were chosen from a northeastern preppy perspective. But that's O.K. because most of the preppy schools are (or were) in the northeast. I fear things are changing and true preppydom is in danger of fading because of political correctness, dumbed-down testing, and deemphasis on social graces and academic excellence.
Like aother reviewer, I too attended Highland Park High School near Dallas, graduating in the class of 1948. The Official Preppy Handbook could have been passed off as our official behavioral protocol because it fit us to a T. We had our Buffy's, Skippy's, Myrney's, and Tootie's. We partied at the Dallas Country Club and shopped at Nieman's.
The social crazyness described by Birnbach disguised a firm underlying commitment to excellence later in life. Our graduates went on to become Olympic Gold Medalists, military Generals, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders of industry and government. The official Preppy Handbook will forever occupy a favored spot on my bookshelf because it brings back so many memories.
Even if you don't identify with preppy this is a fun read, and for the non-preppies it has lots of pictures.