(price-clipped) [solid clean copy, bumped at bottom corners but no other significant wear, attractive (if generic) bookplate with previous owner's signature on ffep; jacket shows wear at edges and corners, a few small tears, shallow chipping at spine ends, tiny piece missing at bottom right-hand corner of front panel, considerable fading to spine (where the title is almost unreadable)]. Interesting Hollywood not-quite-novel (although the front panel of the jacket calls it "a novel," I have in the past seen a contemporary disclaimer issued by the publisher, averring that it was in fact "a fictionalized biography, a biographie fantastique." (So in other words, like many Hollywood autobiographies of that era, it has only a glancing relationship to reality.) At any rate, it's an interesting book, a semi-comic work that has relatively little to do with the film biz per se -- however, the protagonist/narrator (named "David Broekman," incidentally) does spend an inordinate amount of time circulating among various Hollywood hangers-on and has-beens, all the while pursuing an increasingly cockeyed and desperate scheme to fulfill his dream of conducting his own symphony at the Hollywood Bowl. The author himself was an (unemployed) Hollywood conductor and composer during the Depression.
Title: The Shoestring Symphony
Edition: First Edition
Illustrator: Illustrated by (dj design) F.E. Banbery
Location Published: New York, Simon and Schuster: 1948
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good+ in Very Good- dj
Categories: Fiction: Hollywood
Seller ID: 16096
Keywords: composers musicians hollywood bowl great depression music hollywood fiction biography