NEVER SAY DIET.

By Corey Ford '-. NewYork: Henry Holt & Co. 52 pp. $I.50.

" This slight volume" may not be, in the lexicon of writers and publishers, a happy augury in the opening sentence of book reviews. It is, however, the proper accolade for this book which is easy to pick up, easy to put down, easy to raise and lower fifty times from the standing, sitting, prone, or fifth-martini position - and is on the subject of Diet.

Mr. Ford obviously enjoyed writing it, Mr. Taylor clearly convulsed himself doing the drawings, you will share their sensations in reading it - and the only dark ambivalence in this whole rollicking picture is the "why-do-you-suppose-the-Book-Review-Editor-thought-of-me?" speculation of the reviewer.

This frivolous introduction should not lead the prospective reader to think that this opus, however low its specific gravity, lacks Substance and Truth. There is more than a little of universality in it. Who of us, soon or late, by the iron whim of spouse, mother, aunt or Solicitous Friend, or his own passing masochistic impulse, has not come under the fleshmortifying discipline of Dr. Hausrecker's regimen of wheat-germ, yogurt, and that dark destroyer, blackstrap molasses — or Dr. X's version of last or next year, which is totally new and different in every respect other than Its totally repulsive nature. Here, then, is the delirious version of liberation, reaching its climax in Chapter 6 - the Live Older, Look Longer Diet Plan of Dr. Schlump. ("Do You Want To Live A Hundred Years On Yogurt?")

We won't tell you how this book comes out. Mr. Ford, who signs himself "Department of Lipophilics, Dartmouth College" has a shadowy connection with Dartmouth's alumni body as president, secretary, treasurer, class agent and sole member of the Class of 19 -, and occasionally publishers letters from himself in the classnotes' section of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE (and will someday no doubt salute his own memory in some magnificent obituary) and locally is more familiarly and muscularly known as proprietor of Corey Ford's Gymnasium on North Baloh Street. Mr. Taylor, the New Yorker artist who is in his own beguiling fashion even more macabre than Chas. Addams, is the perfect, the ineluctable illustrator of this, volume. Even his characters' eyeballs are corpulent - including the rare skeletal figures like the sad, bearded, bony ascetic who graces one of the fly-leaves among this book's 25 forewords, prefaces, prologues, and introductions, over the title: "AH you have to do is avoid certain things that are fattening, such as food.'

One hopes that Messrs. Ford and Taylor are prepared soon to meet the desperate national need for a work on How To Not Stop Smoking.