Real Vermonters don’t milk goats. They laugh at newly revived books with that title.

Vermont political science professor Frank Bryan and writer friend Bill Mares were bumping along a muddy back road four decades ago when they spotted a pristine log cabin with a two-vehicle carport.

“Flatlander,” Bryan later recalled saying of a perceived out-of-state owner.

“And what are we?” Mares replied.

Mares was born in Missouri, raised in Texas and educated in Massachusetts. Bryan grew up as one of seven students in his class in the Upper Valley town of Newbury — after his delivery in a maternity ward in nearby New Hampshire.

“You’re not a real Vermonter,” Mares said.

Bryan, aiming to change the subject, pointed to a road sign advertising goat’s milk.

“Real Vermonters,” he declared, “don’t milk goats.”

And so begins the story of the 1983 book “Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats,” the state’s all-time bestselling humor title, which is set for a comeback this fall with a 43rd anniversary edition.

Back in the Reagan era, Bryan and Mares, inspired by the satirical book “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche,” turned their back-road conversation into the introduction of a 94-page paperback.

“Real Vermonters don’t wear bib overalls,” the two went on to declare. “They don’t tie their sweaters around their necks. They wear hats when it’s cold, even if they have wavy hair. They never try to look like farmers. Most of all, Real Vermonters never, never try to look like Real Vermonters.”

That Christmas shopping season, the Bennington Bookshop sold 200 copies of the title — nearly 15% of its total holiday sales, according to the local newspaper. Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore reported even bigger success.

“We sold hundreds,” then co-owner Edward Morrow was quoted by the Bennington Banner. “We just kept on reordering and reordering it.”

The now-closed New England Press of Shelburne ultimately churned out 70,000 copies — one for every seven of the state’s 511,546 residents at the time — before curbing production in the 1990s.

Mares went on to write nearly 20 other books before his death in 2024. Bryan, 85, has retired from public life and press interviews after teaching at the University of Vermont for 36 years. And “Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats” has been out of print for three decades — a challenge for storekeepers who still receive requests for it.

Enter Michael DeSanto, owner of Vermont’s Phoenix Books and its Onion River Press. He recently approached Mares’ wife of 53 years, Christine Hadsel, about the possibility of another printing.

Hadsel reread the original manuscript she typed for her husband in the seemingly prehistoric age before personal computers. She smiled at its “Things Real Vermonters Are Born With.” First and foremost: “An ability to tell New Hampshire from Vermont.”

“Real Vermonters would never tear down a barn when they could let it fall down,” the manuscript continued. “Real Vermonters, of course, always park their cars pointing out — it’s easier getting out headfirst than backwards after a good snowfall. Finally, Real Vermonters don’t honk when the light turns green.”

The more things change, Hadsel saw, the more they stay the same.

“Fundamentally,” she said in a recent interview, “we still have a state where we have a lot of tensions between the incomers who have more money and the people who are already here who tend to have less.”

That’s why Onion River Press is rolling out a $13 reprint (up from the original $4.95) with a few other revisions.

“We don’t want to change what it was,” Hadsel said, “but it needs some updating.”

People not alive or around in 1983 can read one of several newly added “explainer” footnotes to learn that Burlington’s Oasis Diner — the place where Bryan and Mares wrote the book — was a Bank Street staple for a half-century before its recent reincarnation as Burl’s Downtown Kitchenette.

(Burlington, the book informs, remains “a large city that has the advantage of being very close to the Vermont border.”)

For those who question the book’s assertion that “Real Vermonters don’t believe in summer,” a second footnote points out that the original work was written before the advent of the term “climate change.”

And for anyone wondering why the authors told Bernie Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, to “(1) renounce socialism and (2) shed his accent” before they’d consider him a “Real Vermonter,” a third footnote simply deems that thought “Wrong!”

Readers of all ages can more easily appreciate the rest of the book, illustrated by Vermont cartoonist Howard Johnson.

“Real Vermont Women know the Women’s Auxiliary is anything but,” it says. “Real Vermonters’ kids don’t go to summer camp unless they work there. In the fall, you can find them ignoring the foliage almost anywhere.”

A list of “Items Not Found in a Real Vermonter’s General Store” begins with decaf espresso beans, suntan oil and contact lens fluid.

“Things Real Vermonters Recognize as a Waste of Time” include Interstate 91 north of St. Johnsbury, Interstate 91 south of St. Johnsbury and “advising a Flatlander not to burn white birch.”

As for “What Real Vermonters Dread the Most,” citations range from “change” and property reappraisals to any weather forecast that opens with the words “only a dusting is expected.”

Four decades ago, reviews of the book observed that its humor cushioned more serious commentary.

“The premise of the book is simple: Real Vermonters are dying out and people ‘from away,’ identified as Flatlanders, are moving in,” the late sixth-generation Vermonter Keith Jennison wrote in the Vermont Historical Society’s magazine. “Only by identifying their differences can they get along with each other — provided they feel like it.”

Today, Hadsel notes the irony of her and Mares moving to the state in 1970 for its bucolic charm: “There were so many people like us who came in and bought farmland — and didn’t farm it.”

As the late New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren, who lived his last years in Brookfield, wrote Mares in 1983: “I do like the book, and it does raise serious issues about rural area inroads by the likes of us and how we change the nature of the nature we’ve come for in the first place.”

Hadsel is set to promote the reprint Sept. 18 at the Tunbridge World’s Fair, Sept. 20 at Brookfield’s Old Town Hall, Sept. 27 at Stowe’s Alchemist Brewery, Oct. 1 at Woodstock’s Yankee Bookshop, Oct. 11 at Burlington’s Saint Johns Club, Oct. 16 at Lyndon’s York Street Meeting House, Oct. 27 at Rutland’s Phoenix Books, Nov. 1 at Newbury’s Bailey Club, Nov. 7 at St. Albans’ The Eloquent Page, Nov. 8 at the Charlotte Grange and Nov. 9 at Guilford’s Broad Brook Community Center.

(She has time: “Anyone seen mowing the lawn after September 15th is not a Real Vermonter,” the book notes.)

The 43rd anniversary edition includes a “New Real Vermonters’ List” featuring Strafford “Gen Z’s rock star” Noah Kahan, Tony Award-winning “Hadestown” creator Anaïs Mitchell and fellow Vermont singer-songwriter Grace Potter.

But it ends with the same 1983 warning: “Before you get pretensions about how ‘real’ you are, we caution you to remember that Real Vermonters Don’t Read Books Like This.”

Disclosure: The late Bill Mares was a member of the governing board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the nonprofit that owns and operates VTDigger.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Real Vermonters don’t milk goats. They laugh at newly revived books with that title..