[book is clean, tight and virtually flawless, vintage price sticker (from the famous San Francisco department store The White House) on rear pastedown; jacket somewhat discolored (or dust-soiled) along top and right edges of front panel, with a couple of short closed tears at bottom of rear panel, light soiling overall]. "Hunting, drinking, lovers, cards, money. Caroline Merryweather had them all. At sixty, alone in a cold little New England farmhouse, she writes her story as she interprets it through the life of Maggie Dawson, the one friend she had really loved." A primary characte... View More...
[light shelfwear, a touch of foxing to cloth at edges of covers and along hinges; jacket bright and attractive, slight wear to base of spine, small closed tear at bottom front hinge]. This "story of a well-bred girl's coming of age" was that years winner of the Avery Hopwood Award, which has been presented at/by the University of Michigan since the early 1930s. The New York Times critic, altough noting that the book was "a far cry from the brash and earthy realism" of the previous year's winner, Maritta Wolff's "Whistle Stop," praised it as "an earnest and sincere chronicle of the life of [it... View More...
(black and gilt decorated cover; no dust jacket) [front hinge starting, light dampstaining to covers, offsetting to endpapers, spine cloth a bit faded, gilt spine lettering rubbed but still readable]. Novel about a small-town girl who becomes a stage actress. A contemporary publisher's ad called it "a brilliant novel of stage life, with an unusual and unconventional heroine," also noting that it featured "a frankly daring discussion of the sex problem." The author was the second wife (and widow) of British actor Aubrey Boucicault, the youngest child of the famed Irish actor/... View More...
[moderate shelfwear, soiling to top edge of text block, gift inscription (non-authorial) on ffep, small vintage bookseller's rubber stamp (Bertrand Smith "Acres of Books," Long Beach, California) on front pastedown; jacket heavily worn with various chips, tears, creasing, etc.] Described as "an English story written in India" in the jacket blurb, its theme deals with "reincarnation and fate." The first of just two novels by this British author, who trained as an actress and apparently had a brief stage career in the 1930s prior to going to the Sudan (during the first ... View More...
[nice-looking copy, tight and clean, very light wear to book extremities; jacket shows minor wear at corners]. "This is a basic love story, woven into a tapestry of the glitter, intrigue and violence, of immense courage and over-mastering avarice against a background of 16th Century France and America. Pierre and Marguerite are caught in the age-old struggle of love against the arbitrary powers which band to separate them. They are both orphans, scions of great houses, immured after the custom of 16th Century France, she in a lonely castle and he in the adjacent monastery." She's g... View More...
DETAILS NEEDED. World War II-era political parable, somewhat in the vein of "Animal Farm" -- "a story that is, at one and the same time, both symbol and adventure, actual and romantic, satirical and completely engaging." Oh, and did I mention that all the characters are birds? The hero is Roderick Robin Jr., marked as a rebel from birth due to his having hatched out of a pink egg; in the course of the narrative he defies his family and gets involved in the Sparrow Movement, which is fighting for a new social order that involves the redistribution of apple seeds. As radical w... View More...
(no dust jacket) [worn but intact, light staining to covers, diagonal red line of undetermined origin/purpose across bottom right corner of front cover, vintage bookseller's label (Unity Pegues, Hollywood, California) on rear pastedown]. The second novel by the future New Yorker drama critic and even-more future Hollywood screenwriter and producer. It's a satire about a group of people who gather at the country home of a bishop(!) for a weekend getaway from the city; the action begins at 6:10 p.m. Friday and ends at 10:40 a.m. the following Monday. The New York Times praised the book as "en... View More...
[solid copy, slight fraying to bottom corners, minor wear at spine ends, light dust-soiling to top edge; jacket has some shallow chipping along the top edge, a bit of paper loss at spine ends and bottom right-hand corner of front panel, general rubbing/scuffing]. INSCRIBED, SIGNED and dated (November 8, 1937) by the author on the dedication page. "Genevieve Gertrude," the red-headed schoolgirl who is the heroine of this episodic novel, was the author's signature character, having first appeared in stories published in "Good Housekeeping" magazine. (This book was in fact reprinted under the ... View More...
(price-clipped) [solid copy, some wear (board exposed) at bottom rear corner; jacket wrinkled/creased along top edge of front panel, some paper loss at corners and spine ends]. Satirical novel set against the backdrop of the Russian ballet; the fourth (and last) in the authors' series about the wacky misadventures of the Vladimir Stroganoff ballet company. (Sergei Diaghilev features throughout the story, alongside the fictional characters.) Originally published in England, in 1945, as "Six Curtains for Stroganova." View More...
(no dust jacket) [moderately worn copy, spine turned, spine cloth faded and white spine lettering rubbed; attractive small label (like a miniature bookplate) on front pastedown]. (line drawings) One of this writing team's scarcer works, a satirical novel about a young Englishman who falls in with a group of down-and-out White Russian emigres in Paris, who have banded together in a kind of anti-socialist social club known as the White Elephants. Its philosophy is explained by one of its members: "We serve no useful purpose. We have no place in the struggle for existence. We refuse to con... View More...
[shelfwear and bumping to bottom corners, age-toning to edges of text block (typical of Rinehart books in this period), overall a clean and solidly bound book; jacket moderately edgeworn, light rubbing/soiling, small pull-tear in rear panel]. Novel -- sorry, "magical tale" -- about "a man in an unnamed city, holding down an unrewarding job in a wonderfully bureaucratic organization called simply The Agency, returning each evening to his dissatisfied and unsatisfying wife." His miserable existence is leavened only once a year, "at Holiday time, [when] he assumes his secret... View More...
[book itself is solid and internally clean, some soiling and light shelfwear to top and bottom edges; the jacket, however, has had about as many bad things done to it as you can imagine: it's been laminated (which has resulted in considerable yellowing/discoloration, trimmed a bit along the top and bottom edges, and the flaps are glued to the pastedowns; some of the laminate has also been peeled away, which doesn't help matters much]. A novelization, essentially, of Brecht and Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera." Jacket-blurbed as "an unashamed and outrageous epic of roguery triu... View More...
(no dust jacket) [spine cloth faded (gilt title still fully readable), top corner of ffep cut away, light bumping to several corners]. Uncommon novel which (from my brief skim of it) seems to be a tale of Jewish village life in some unspecified Eastern European location. (I've seen it described elsewhere as a "fantasy romance about a group of people that follow a town 'crier' for a round of constant parties and romance," which may be a grab from the jacket blurb (no jacket present on this copy to help me, alas) but I honestly cannot discern any "fantasy" element.) This seems... View More...
(no dust jacket) [decent copy, binding intact, internally clean; a little staining to boards, paper spine label partially torn away, one-time owner's large pencil signature on ffep, remnant of vintage bookseller label (unidentifiable) on rear pastedown Novel about the rise of a political boss in a middle-sized American city, painted with a wide brush. A contemporary reviewer caught the flavor of the book: "There is a continuous procession of officeholders, ward heelers, business men, reformers, conventionalists of the underworld and conventionalists of the overworld. There are chapters o... View More...
(no dust jacket) [moderate shelfwear, foxing/spotting to top edge, front hinge a little weak, horizontal scrape to gilt spine lettering in first word of title]. (illustrated endpapers) "The frank and original Chronicles of a young Doctor serving as an Interne in the Knickerbocker Maternity Hospital of New York City," as related a friend back home in a series of "Dear Joe" letters. It should be noted that "back home" is Georgia, and that the author/narrator displays the prejudices of his background, at one point experiencing "a feeling of Nausea" after discover... View More...
[spine a little turned, boards a little bowed, shallow dent at top of front cover, light age-toning to page edges; jacket just a bit edgeworn, one tiny tear at top of spine, another tiny closed tear at top of front panel, light soiling to rear panel]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the ffep (see addtional note below). The second of only two books published by this noted screenwriter during his lifetime (and his only novel to see print), this Dostoyevskian tale of a rebellious young man who works his way up in the San Francisco underworld until "tragedy, horror and disintegration&#... View More...
(no dust jacket) [reading copy only, considerable general wear, bumping to corners, scrape on fore-edge with resultant gouging to page edges in about half the book, etc.; apparently an ex-rental library book, stamped on ffep with bookshop name (The Boulevard Book Shop, Sherman Oaks, Calif.) and a charming bit of advice ("Please treat me as you would any guest in your home")]. Novel in which a spirited 18-year-old London girl, for some reason or another, enters into a platonic marriage with a dour, puritanical older man, and goes off to live with him in the bleak north country of Englan... View More...
[a nice solid clean copy, slight fading to cloth at edges of covers and along spine; the jacket shows some wear at edges and extremities, minor chipping at top of spine]. Novel about a struggling couple, Molly and Bill, "who seek to win a living and a home for themselves in that strange jungle of the motor industry made up of Detroit and its satelite [sic] towns," only to have their modest dreams of a happy life shattered by the onset of the Depression. A stark depiction of a couple of ordinary people gradually worn down by the crushing weight of poverty, and the desperation that propels the... View More...
[nice tight copy, light shelfwear to bottom edges; jacket has a tiny chip at the top of the front panel, an even tinier one at the bottom of the rear panel, some rubbing to the rear panel, slight fading to spine]. SIGNED and DATED (February 1948, the month of publication) by the author on the ffep. The screenwriter-almost-director's second novel, in which a labor agitator stirs up political and racial tensions in a small Southwestern town. A jacket blurb by Humphrey Bogart (who appeared that same year in KEY LARGO, written by Brooks) calls it "the most gripping novel I have read in many ... View More...
[good sound copy, minor shelfwear, some fading to cloth at spine ends, one-time owner's name/address stamped on top edge, fore-edge and ffep; jacket edgeworn, with various small nicks and tears, a bit of paper loss at both ends of spine, some surface-scraping to front panel, shallow chip at bottom of rear panel]. Novel about a young woman from Weehawken, New Jersey, who finds her only pleasure in music. Escaping from home (and a domineering mother), she attends Columbia University, and subsequently tries to "find herself" while making a precarious living in New York. The New York Ti... View More...
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