Snips and Snails

“LITTLE did I suspect what I was grooming myself for when I used to sit up straight at table and eat my spinach like a good girl. I thought I was minding my Ps and Qs and my mother so I could have my dessert. But, actually, what I was unwittingly doing was nourishing my blood and sinew and building the Body Beautiful for sacrifice on the altar of Pedagogy. So help me—in my dewy innocence, I was growing up to be a schoolteacher…”

In Snips and Snails, first published in 1953, the author of the hilarious bestseller Out on a Limb, Louise Baker, finds herself in an even more precarious position as teacher, “mother,” and town marshal at a boy’s school…