The current obscurity of James Laver (1899–1975), an expert on the history of dress and fashion, a biographer of Huysmans and Nostradamus, a master of light verse, and the author of a 1932 picaresque gem of a comic novel, Nymph Errant, is something of a crime. The obscurity certainly applies to the novel, popular in its day and still fresh to read but apparently not reprinted in recent years. It was made into a Charles B. Cochran revue in 1933 starring Gertrude Lawrence and with a score by Cole Porter, who penned such classics as “Experiment,” “It’s Bad for Me,” and “The Physician” for the show and later named it the favorite of all his musicals. Laver was delighted with Porter’s genius, observing that the stage had not seen such “ingeniously witty” lyrics since the days of Gilbert & Sullivan. Gertrude Lawrence brought the house down night after night, first in Manchester and then in London, despite her invariably singing off-key. Even so, a reviewer in the Observer damned the musical with faint praise as a “pantomime for highbrows,” and it closed in London after only 154 performances, never crossing the Atlantic to Broadway. Nor did Twentieth Century-Fox take up its option to make a film version, perhaps fearful that the administrators of the Hays Code, who had become censorious, would disapprove of Nymph Errant’s playfully racy story.

I first became aware of James Laver shortly after his death in 1975 in a fire at