Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot — Reginald Bretnor

Between 1956 and 1992, under the name Grendel Briarton (an anagram of his real name), Reginald Bretnor wrote 122 very short sci-fi stories about Ferdinand Feghoot, a time-traveling, galaxy-hopping emissary from the Society for the Aesthetic Rearrangement of History. Using a device known only as )(, Feghoot visits and solves the problems of historical figures and intelligent beings on other worlds. Each story is an elaborate setup for an awesome/awful pun. They became an art form: A feghoot . . . is a humorous short story or vignette ending in a pun (typically a play on a well-known phrase), where the story contains sufficient context to recognize the punning humor (Wikipedia). They've been out of print for 30 years. This new edition contains all of Bretnor's original Feghoots plus his essay On the Proper Perpetration of Feghoots; a foreword by Dean Smith, who worked with Bretnor in the last year of his life; and a bevy of illustrations old and new.