Sarah Lyall at the New York Times has some fun with the most fun part of the London Review of Books: the personal ads. Rejecting the earnest self-promotion of most personal ads, she writes, the correspondents in the London Review column tend instead to present themselves as idiosyncratic, even actively repellent. So no wonder David Rose, the LRB's advertising director, has compiled some of his favorite ads into a book, "They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books," which is being published by Scribner. The title borrows from an actual ad, placed by a 46-year-old male physicist.

Rose knew that something unusual was going on, he said, when the very first ad he received, after starting the column in 1998, began: "67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur picking my toothless way through the urban sprawl, self-destructive, sliding towards pathos, jacked up on Viagra and on the lookout for a contortionist who plays the trumpet." The column has resulted in at least two children and four marriages. (One already ended in divorce.) The trick to success? Don't be conventional. After placing an ad calling herself "gentle, curvy, tactile, educated and funny," one regular advertiser, calling herself Susan W., heard from one man who bragged that he was free of infection - "I did not get the feeling he was trying to be funny," she said - and another who announced that he lived without electricity in the woods, in a house made from trees he had chopped down himself. She changed tactics and wrote another ad saying, "I've got a mouth on me that can peel paint off walls, but I can always apologize." That one worked wonders...