By DWIGHT GARNER

The British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-95) published three books about the judicious but enthusiastic consumption of alcohol: “On Drink” in 1972, “Everyday Drinking” in 1983 and “How’s Your Glass?” in 1984. Long out of print, these volumes have finally been gathered together under the overall title “Everyday Drinking” and topped off with a fizzy introduction by Christopher Hitchens. They are so delicious they make you feel as if you’ve just had the first sip of the planet’s coldest, driest martini.
Amis’s ideas for curing a physical hangover were fairly routine, though a few of the crazier ones will make you laugh. (“Go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane, needless to say with a non-hungover person at the controls.)
His notions about fixing a metaphysical hangover - “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future - are where things got interesting. Amis recommended a course of “hangover reading that “rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.
Thus he suggested beginning with Milton - “My own choice would tend to include the final scene of ‘Paradise Lost,’ he wrote - “with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6 - before running through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eric Ambler and, finally, a soothing application of light comedies by P. G. Wodehouse and Peter De Vries.
Amis mostly wrote about preparing cocktails at home, for one’s self and for guests. He stressed, again and again, the importance of making a genuine effort when preparing cocktails. “Serving good drinks,” he wrote, “like producing anything worth while, from a poem to a motorcar, is troublesome and expensive.”
While he looked for ways to trim costs, Amis loathed all forms of social stinginess. (“With alcoholic ritual,” Mr. Hitchens writes in his introduction, “the whole point is generosity.”) One essay collected here - it deserves to be rediscovered - is “Mean Sod’s Guide,” a tongue-in-cheek tutorial about how to “stint your guests on quality and quantity” while seeming to have done them very well. Among his tips for a host determined not to pour too many drinks: “Sit in a specially deep easychair, and practice getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan.”
Throughout his life Amis was absurdly quotable on almost every topic, but on imbibing especially. On diets: “The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
” On why serious drinkers should own a separate refrigerator for their implements: “Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its icecompartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.” On the benefits of sangria: “You can drink a lot of it without falling down.”
Amis wrote with feeling about alcohol’s place in society. “The human race,” he noted, “has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is onetenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”
There are even recipes. Amis described the effects of his tequila-based version of a Bloody Mary this way: “a splendid pickme- up, and throw-me-down, and jump-onme. Strongly disrecommended for mornings after.”