MacBird

MacBird! (1967) – Barbara Garson
(Penguin Books, ISBN: none, Condition: Good — courtesy of “Crappy Old Books”)

Shakespeare gave us Macbeth, Barbara Garson gave us MacBird! — the 1967 satirical mash-up nobody asked for but everyone secretly needed. Imagine The Scottish Play rewritten as a savage political lampoon of Lyndon B. Johnson, complete with cauldrons bubbling not with eye of newt but with Vietnam, paranoia, and electoral skulduggery. It was the Sixties: satire was hot, theatre was radical, and someone had to prove that Jacobean bloodbaths and American politics were basically the same show.

This Penguin paperback was once the kind of thing you could brandish at a dinner party to prove you were both literate and groovy. Today it’s more of a cultural relic: a reminder that protest could rhyme in iambic pentameter and that Shakespeare’s witches would have fit right in on the evening news.

Condition: Good. Which in the Crappy Old Books lexicon means “still a book, definitely legible, with no obvious bite marks.” The pages have survived the intervening decades of Nixon, Reagan, and beyond, though the ISBN has not — this copy hails from that innocent time before international barcodes colonised everything. A true analogue rebel.

So if you’ve ever wanted to see Macbeth re-cast as LBJ, Lady Macbeth as Lady Bird, and politics itself as the ultimate tragic farce, here’s your chance. Crappy Old Books offers this slightly world-weary but perfectly serviceable copy, fit for anyone who enjoys their Shakespeare with a side of satire and their paperbacks with a whiff of history.

Slightly squashed spine.

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