The NYRB edition of Elaine Dundy’s Dud Avocado comes out June 5 (with an introduction by Terry Teachout). What you see pictured is a copy of the 1961 Signet edition. I don’t know if you can make out the cover art but it’s pretty marvelous: The girl is sitting atop a giant avocado, wearing what might be a peignoir or a pink frock or kimono pajamas — it’s a fashion Rorschach, that outfit. Inside the avocado is the description, “The blithe and bubbling bestseller about an American girl who goes to Paris to be naughty– and quite often succeeds!”

Arranged around the giant avocado are (clockwise): The Eiffel tower, a striped canopy that says “Bistro”, a typewriter with sheets of paper floating off it, a guy holding aloft a champagne cocktail, and what I take to be the Pont Neuf.

Inside the book smells like used bookstore, and the back cover has a shout out for a forthcoming Signet paperback, The Chapman Report, which is given this thumbnail synopsis: “A three-man team enters a fashionable California suburb to complete its interviews on the Sex Habits of American Wives. This is the story of six of the women who volunteer, exploding the community into excitement, tension, and shocking discovery.”

It’s hard to see but there are two stacks in the picture; the front stack is what we’re taking to Europe. (The travel companion, who often serves as a pack animal on these occasions, has deemed the number “very reasonable.” He may have been being ironic but I’m taking him at his word.) It includes: The Goncourt diaries; The Sot-Weed Factor (I left off reading it earlier as I realized it’s the ideal travel size; small enough to carry in a purse but big enough to sustain if, let’s say, one were to become trapped in a museum for four days due to a hideous chain of events involving a catapult and a giant avocado, and as everyone was freaking out and trying ineffectually to roll the giant avocado from the doorway, one could just sit calmly in a corner reading The Sot-Weed Factor until a giant rescue lever arrived); the second volume of Dance to the Music of Time; the blithe & bubbly adventures of an American girl who goes to Paris to be naughty (and often succeeds!); and Remembrance of Things Past, which I expect to have polished off by the time they’re handing out pretzels.

It’s a stodgy but satisfying reading list. I wish it had Savage Detectives and the Edith Wharton bio on it but they were judged “not reasonable” and “heavy” with the additional point that “Europe has books too.”