Place Settings.(Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners)(Book review)

New York's moneyed class has always loved to read about itself. In the early years of the twentieth century, it particularly loved to do so in a magazine called Town Topics: The Journal of Society. Far and away the weekly's most popular feature, titled "Saunterings," offered material of a sort that other publications, many of which had society columns of their own, deemed unprintable.

In late June, 1905, Edwin Post, a financier who had recently suffered a string of losses, received a visit from a representative of Town Topics named Charles Ahle. Ahle carried with him a letter of introduction from the magazine's managing editor, along with a set of galleys. He ...