<P>With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces <B>The Buncombe Collection</B>, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: <I>Happy Days</I>, <I>Heathen Days</I>, <I>Newspaper Day</I>s, <I>Prejudices</I>, <I>Treatise on the Gods</I>, <I>On Politics</I>, <I>Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work</I>, <I>Minority Report</I>, and <I>A Second Mencken Chrestomathy</I>. </P><P>Most of these autobiographical writings first appeared in the <I>New Yorker</I>. Here Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s.</P>