Prep-related Resources (a starting point)

Articles - Popular Newspaper & Magazine

• "Rejoice, Muffy and Biff: A Preppy Primer Revisited." Motoko Rich. NYT online. 4 Apr. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/04preppy.html

Articles - Scholarly

Blogs (celebratory)

• Summer is a Verb. http://summerisaverb.blogspot.com/- mentioned in 04/04 NYT article
• An Etiquette Grrl Strikes Back. http://etiquettegrrls.blogspot.com/ - run by the author of two prep-heavy etiquette books, Things You Need to be Told and its sequel (see below)
  

Subcategory Southern Prepsterdom

• Her Southern Charm. http://hersoutherncharm.blogspot.com/
• Sweet Preppy Mama. http://www.sweetpreppymama.blogspot.com/
• Monograms and Manicures. http://www.kappaprep.com/ - mentioned in 04/04 NYT article

Books - Fiction

• Prep: A Novel. Curtis Sittenfeld. New York: Random, 2005.
• Mating Rituals of the North American WASP. Lauren Lipton. 5 Spot, 2009.
  

Books - Non-fiction
Texts on the subject generally fall either into the category of sociology (understanding the phenomenon) or etiquette (which I'll call conforming to the phenomenon for the meantime - though it's a bit more subversive and extensive than that). Over the next weeks, I'm going to read and assess these books on the basis of their contribution to the understanding of prepsterdom (and I'll have a few things to say about their literary and scholarly merits, no doubt).

The basics

• TPH - starts at around $50 on amazon.com/£50 on amazon.co.uk (this means that immediate purchase it isn't on my priority list)
• True Prep. Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd. New York: Knopf, 2010. - the sequel, to be released Sept. 7, 2010
  

Sociology
(I got these books from the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section on TPH's Amazon site.)

• Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Paul Fussell. Touchstone, 1992.
• Lessons from Privilege: The American Prep School Tradition. Arthur Powell. Cambridge: HUP, 1998.
  

Etiquette/Instructional

• Things You Need to be Told. Leslie Carlin and Honore McDonough Ervin. Penguin, 2001.
• Tipsy in Madras: A complete guide to 80s preppy drinking. Matt Walker and Marissa Walsh.
  

Websites

• Preppy Must Haves. http://preppymusthave.com/

Other Web Resources

• Wikipedia
• Urban Dictionary
• Yahoo Answers (etc.)
• WikiHow

Understanding Prepsterdom

It started with seersucker. I jotted down some innocuous thoughts on how I'm not quite sure what I think of seersucker suits (pros: resilience in tropical conditions; cons: resemblance to pyjamas). Only a few hours later, I stumbled upon the NYT article "Rejoice, Muffy and Biff: A Preppy Primer Revisited": The Preppy Handbook ("a piquant bit of mockery" of prepsterdom, which "ended up being adopted as a kind of guidebook for those who wanted in," thus the NYT) will be updated for the 21st century.

All this got me to thinking that the phenomenon of prepsterdom deserves an in-depth analysis. What is it? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Are there scholarly articles and books on it? Are there non-scholarly articles and books on it?

And thus a project was born. Expect articles on the history of prep, dissections of websites and blogs devoted to preppieness (or is that preppyness?), prepsterdom outside the US, the proliferation of prep - musings that will surely spawn into further entries.

Disclaimer: I imagine that getting ahold of TPH (I'm probably going to be referring to this book a lot, hence the abbreviation) will be difficult after the NYT article (which was a top 10 emailed article yesterday and has been picked up by the Daily Beast with more to follow, surely). But I'll give it a shot.