Two Decades of Chuckles: "The Nutley Papers"

It is twenty years since the publication of The Nutley Papers: A Fresh Look at the Titans of Music by James Billings, illustrated by Eugene Green. The slim volume contains 58 letters that showed up in mysterious fashion in the basement storeroom of the Public Library of Nutley, New Jersey — allegedly from so unlikely a group of composers as Wagner, Beethoven, Chopin, Offenbach, Richard Strauss, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Puccini, letters to and from an equally unlikely group of correspondents, including Ludwig, King of Bavaria, Lord Byron, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Emanuel Schikaneder, Queen Victoria, and others.

The publisher's blurb in 1990 read: "You don't have to be a musician or scholar to read The Nutley Papers. All you want is a little literary savvy and a slightly kinky sense of humor."

The Nutley Papers ($9.95) is distributed by Jerona Music Corporation, PO Box 671, Englewood, New Jersey 07631, E-mail: