The NEW "Preppy Handbook"... coming soon!

Coming soon... to a bookstore near you... the NEXT book for Preppies!

I'm sure you all have heard about this already but just in case... here's the link to an article about the latest version of The Preppy Handbook coming out soon, "True Prep: It's a Whole New Old World" by Lisa Birnbach- super exciting!!!

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/04preppy.html

We definitely need an updating off all-things-preppy with this being thirty years after the first handbook was published. Back in 1980... I was a junior-higher already well-acquainted to utilizing grosgrain hair bows, sporting Lacoste tennis dresses, taking horseback riding lessons, swimming at the yacht club's pools when we weren't sailing, stressing over homework crammed-in after formal dance lessons and realizing that my adult destiny would indeed be tied-up by several years spent in the Junior League. Preppy was something I was but couldn't really name, or knew it could be named, until the handbook came out and wow, there it was- a world I was already entrenched within. Even my chums seemed to come straight out of the handbook as (really and truly) some of them were indeed called, "Buffy", "Bitsy", "Chip" and one guy labeled with the endearment of "Shack" which, in the deep south, doesn't seem all too quirky actually. My mother wore Lilly Pulitzer dresses and split her time between League volunteering and tennis playing while my father sported tortoise shell glasses and navy blue pinstripe jackets during his legal-eagle career days. Our house was a simple, old 1890's renovated farmhouse just down from a neat park on a big lake and like many a true-Preppy, our kitchen was a bit neglected, yes, however our living room and dining room always was busily-engaged entertaining people year-round, even on school nights. It's fun thinking back tonight to how life was for our family as The Preppy Handbook hit the book store shelves back in the early 1980's.

I have a copy complete with its hard case as well as another copy that's so well-thumbed through, I'm amazed it is still intact. My one regret has been with not buying, 'Tipsy in Madras", right when it came out which I see from time to time available for sale or eBay bidding for um, quite-dear amounts. One day I'll break-down and throw the $50 bucks or more towards a used copy but not quite yet.

It'll be interesting to see what all's inside this update of the latest preppy guide. I'm not a big fan of the cover however much I tend to like bright yellow and stripes. It's too bad that they didn't style this cover similar to the madras-framed covers of The Preppy Handbook and Tipsy in Madras. Doing this would have made these books constitute a Classic-Preppy Trilogy of sorts which would have been really nice. (Sorta' like my Kate Spade style books, Manners, Occasions and Style that I cherish and still enjoy thumbing through for lifestyle inspiration from time to time.) But I'm not the writer or publisher of True Prep and heck, I'm frankly just so happy to see this book coming out this September.

You can bet that I'll be buying 2 copies of True Prep...one to keep for posterity and one to reference again and again and again...