The geography quote attributed to Ambrose Bierce has been knocking around on the Internet for years. [Google shows more than two-million results for it.] I’ve never found the origin for “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” nor has David E. Schultz, who along with S.T. Joshi, has created a voluminous database of Bierce’s works. Schultz told The Ambrose Bierce Site: “I’ve looked high and low through my electronic archive of Bierce’s writings (c. 4.5 million words) and have never come across this. I’ve found numerous attributions to Bierce on the Web, but believe that Paul Rodriguez [Mexican-born stand-up comedian] is probably the originator.” It’s one of those quotes that sounds like Bierce but isn’t. The quote as well has been attributed to Mark Twain and Stephen King, also untrue.

Nor do I believe Bierce ever wrote, “The covers of this book are too far apart.” If he did, I've never found the source, nor the name of the book to which he allegedly referred. The line is often repeated as though it's a given that Bierce authored that devastating put-down, but even if he didn’t it’s almost too good a line not to award it to him. It’s possible that Bierce used the sentence in a conversation with an acquaintance, who then repeated it.

All that being said, I found an excellent site called QUOTE INVESTIGATOR that goes into super detail about Bierce's alleged book covers quote. Essentially, it says, the quote is second-hand by the humorist Irvin S. Cobb in 1923 — long after Bierce’s death. Many others picked it up. This is the best debunking I've seen of the Bierce quote, which has also been attributed to Mark Twain and even to Jack Benny. —DS