AUTHOR, AUTHOR, AUTHOR : Skills : Jerry Dunn offers up advice from people who should know. The famous and not-so-famous tell all in ‘Tricks of the Trade.’

Here it is, fall in Ventura County, that ripest of times for apples, lemons, kiwi fruits, pumpkins, pomegranates, artichokes, avocados, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, mushrooms, spinach, squash and new books.

Yes, new books. Three writers from this area have been cultivating new projects, and their works make a strange new crop.

“Jacob’s Journey” is a contemplative novel by Noah benShea, the erstwhile leader of a Carpinteria bagel company. The author is expected to speak at 6 p.m. Friday in the Ventura Bookstore in Ventura.

“Tricks of the Trade” is a paperback collection of practical and impractical advice (subjects include checkers and bullfighting; advisers include Chevy Chase and Kareem Abdul Jabbar), all gathered by Jerry Dunn of Ojai.

And “Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast” is just that--an exhaustive yet goofy guide by UC Santa Barbara researcher Robin Milton Love. At the Channel Islands National Park office in Ventura, rangers say the book is the best available guide to fish off this county’s coastline.

Here, Ventura County Life offers a closer inspection of the books and their authors.

In more than a decade as a professional travel writer, Jerry Dunn has scribbled notes about Rocky Mountain peaks, rolling Oklahoma plains and European side streets. But he found the inspiration for his new book among the constraining white collars of Washington, D.C.

“There are 40,000 lawyers there, or something like that. And each will tell you, ‘I’m a specialist in Clause 1, Paragraph 5 of the Trade and Tariff Act,’ ” Dunn said in a recent interview.

“I thought to myself, ‘Gee, what a narrow life we’re all living, because we’ve all specialized.’ . . . So I started thinking about all the things I don’t know how to do.”

Dunn came up with “Tricks of the Trade,” a lighthearted guide to more than 100 practical and not-so-practical skills, based on interviews with more than 100 prominent and not-so-prominent authorities. Dunn is credited as editor, and Houghton Mifflin Co. is publishing 40,000 paperback copies of the book, priced at $9.95 and due in bookstores this month.

Between its covers, Julia Child explains how to cook the perfect egg. Art Buchwald reveals his secrets for public speaking. Other consulting experts include William F. Buckley (winning a debate), Kareem Abdul Jabbar (shooting the skyhook), and Chevy Chase (doing a pratfall).

Chase “hadn’t thought about what he did,” said Dunn. “He just knew it was funny. As we talked, he was discovering the rules for himself.”

For Muhammad Ali, uncertainty was never a factor. The former boxer surprised Dunn with a phone call one morning and introduced himself by saying, “Hi, this is the greatest that ever lived.” Ali’s chapter includes advice on the rope-a-dope and other boxing strategies.

Less famous sources offered Dunn their wisdom in such areas as whistling Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, playing competition checkers, collecting that $500 that your brother-in-law owes you, getting hotel rooms at a discount, skipping stones, and fending off muggers. (“Go for the genitals,” suggests Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.)

Dunn found five-star waiter Tim Dewey while eating dinner at a rustic lodge in Stehekin, Wash. On a stroll through Montecito, he found poker-bluffing expert London Haywood wearing a “World Series of Poker” sports jacket. Some of the advice Dunn accumulated:

In making tea, says the master of ceremonies at the Ritz in London, the water should be boiled only briefly, and the tea leaves should be loose, not in bags. The tea should then stand for three minutes.

To kill cockroaches, says celebrity exterminator Michael Bohdan, use a bait station instead of spray or foggers.

To boil the perfect egg, says Julia Child, prick the shell to relieve air-bubble pressure. Also, don’t heat more than a dozen at a time, and peel them under a thin stream of cold water.

To train a championship jumping frog, says Croaker College founder Bill Steed, play inspiration tapes while the competitors rest on their little water beds. Something like: “You’re a great frog. Your skin is soft and moist like damp velvet. Your beautiful eyes reflect your effervescent personality. You like people; people like you--but most important of all, you like yourself!”

The man who collected all this advice is a 44-year-old Stanford graduate who confesses to just three particular skills: writing, cooking “a passable omelet,” and executing a few sleight-of-hand magic tricks. He was happy to present this book to his editor at Houghton Mifflin because the editor “had just finished a book by the student leader of Tian An Men Square, and he needed a laugh.”

Dunn, who grew up in Los Angeles, spent the mid-1980s in Washington D.C., where he worked as an editor and writer for National Geographic Traveler magazine. In 1987, he and his wife and two children moved to a rambling adobe home on an acre lot in Ojai.

Dunn still contributes regularly to National Geographic Traveler, and he has written volumes on the Rocky Mountain states and Oklahoma for the Smithsonian Guide to Historic America. But since early last year, Dunn said, “Tricks of the Trade” has been his main project.

For each of the hundred-plus entries in the book, Dunn wrote at least three letters. Then there were scores of telephone interviews, and negotiations with intermediaries representing celebrities.

Dunn says he had hoped to include Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren, but couldn’t come to an agreement with the columnist’s syndicate.

Theodor Geisel, the children’s author, was another on Dunn’s early list, but Geisel wrote back in early 1990 to say he wasn’t feeling well. Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, died Sept. 24 at age 87.

In all, Dunn estimated, 60% of those queried were willing to offer the advice he was seeking. None, he said, “even mentioned the thought of compensation.”

And some of their advice, Dunn added, will serve him beyond the project at hand.

After his conversation with journalist and interview specialist John Brady, Dunn said, he came to agree with Brady’s conclusion that “you should never ask for an interview . . . . It’s one of those words that detonate people’s fears. You say, ‘I’d like to talk to you.’ ”

And after his talk with 88-year-old cobweb-painter Mabel Wood, Dunn said, he felt he had found “a jewel of an American type. She’s the only person who’s doing it. . . . To me, these are kind of Charles Kuraltish treasures.”

From “Tricks of the Trade,” edited by Jerry Dunn. Gene Shalit offers instructions for tying a bow tie:

* 1. Put on a shirt (important). Raise the collar.

* 2. Select an appropriate tie.

* 3. Place it under shirt collar and around your neck. (Professional wrestlers who do not have necks should eschew bow ties.)

* 4. Professional wrestlers should look up “eschew.”

* 5. Now allow the two ends of the bow tie to hang down so they are even. (If the tie has three ends, it is not even, it is odd.)

* 6. Oh, one thing. Before you drape the tie around your neck, adjust the thingamajig on the back so that it conforms to your neck size.

* 7. If you wear a size 19 or larger, discard bow tie and apply for a job as a professional wrestler. (See No. 4.)

* 8. Grip the right end and gently pull down so that the right end is 2-3 inches longer than the left end. (Note to football players: I mean the right and left ends of your tie.)

* 9. Cross the right end over the left end, making an X. Then take one of the ends and loop it under and pull it through the loop (there, you’ve got it), and then yank both wings with a short, sharp motion, uh-huh, now fuss with it just . . . a . . . little . . . bit . . . and then shape it--careful, careful--just the way you want it--and, voila! Finito!

* 10. Nice going.

Next week: How to Put on Your Socks.