The Ring Cost a Dime

Of all the various sub-categories of romances within my collection, few are as fun to read as the delightfully ridiculous romance with the outrageous plot.  Most of the outlandish plot romances I have are from the 1930s, with a majority but certainly not all of them representing the latter half of the decade.  The Ring Cost a Dime is no mere bauble, it is a shining gem within these treasured stories.  One marriage of convenience plot isn’t enough for this story; The Ring Cost a Dime has two!

My copy of The Ring Cost a Dime was a New York Rare Book Week 2019 find from Yesterday’s Gallery and Babylon Revisited Rare Books.  Written by Rob Eden (aka Robert and Eve Burkhardt), The Ring Cost a Dime was published in 1939 by Gramercy.  OCLC only lists one copy, at Ohio State.  Combining the scarcity of this title with the excellent condition of my copy, well, there’s a small running joke that this book seems to have picked up in my family:  “The ring cost a dime… the book did NOT.”

My favorite part of any Rob Eden novel worth its salt are the small amusing moments thrown in, and The Ring Cost a Dime doesn’t disappoint!  In order, the three best moments of this book are:  3.  Upon sharing their first dinner together, the protagonist (Janice) tells the love interest that she doesn’t like the short collars on his shirts or his taste in ties.  2.  The first time Janice is in her future husband’s apartment, she goes to his bookcase and determines that she does approve of his taste in books.  1.  The first time Janice writes her ex to say they’re through, she does it while on the clock at work.  Using company stationery.  A coworker reads it over for her and approves.

This book was the quarantine read I needed, a breath of fresh air.  Discussions of wealth, women’s careers, and how finances are negotiated within relationships are incorporated into Janice Garth’s story.  Her story begins with her fiancé reading the will of his recently deceased rich aunt.  Yes, this story has a wonky inheritance plot!  Aunt Martha Dorian left Howard one million dollars, but only if he marries his aunt’s protegee, Betty Wallace!  Before this, Janice and Howard had created a careful budget with their combined and equal salaries, determining that they’d be able to marry in two years time.  However, with this will, Howard insists on marrying Betty and simply divorcing her a year later to keep the money.  Betty pretends to be on board with this plan until after “I do,” when she dramatically informs Janice that she intends to keep Howard.  Janice is heartbroken.

Despondent, Janice takes the bus and walks home in the rain, and is pleasantly surprised when a stranger from the bus offers to share his umbrella.  She discovers they are neighbors, and then her new friend, Van Emerson, admits that he’s in trouble at his new job.  His employer only hires married men, so Van lied about the existence of a Mrs. Emerson to get the job.  Now, Van’s new boss’ wife wants to pay a social call to Mrs. Emerson, and I think everyone can see where this is going… a second marriage of convenience!

The title for The Ring Cost a Dime comes from Janice buying a ring at a dime store to pass off as her wedding ring.  When the wife of Van’s boss pays Janice a house call, she comments that it is strange Janice doesn’t have a ring.  Janice says it’s getting resized and wears her dime ring to a company party.  Later on in the story, Van produces a more suitable ring.

Even though it’s a sham marriage, Van immediately insists on providing Janice with a weekly allowance of $50 ($5 more than what her job pays), pays her rent, makes her the beneficiary of all his accounts, and gives her a key to his apartment.  “All good wives should have keys to their husbands’ apartments” (142).  So starts the married life of Janice and Van.  They settle into a happy routine of sharing meals and evenings together in peaceful companionship.  Meanwhile, over at Howard and Betty’s, Betty is renovating the oppressive Dorian family mansion while Howard continues to insist that everything will work out all right with him and Janice in the end.

Along the way, Van declares his feels for Janice, which she doesn’t immediately reciprocate because of Howard.  They have a falling out period, but reunite at the end of the story when Van agrees to visit Janice’s family with her in her small hometown for Christmas.  As soon as Van and Janice get their happy ending, a few paragraphs before the book ends, Van tells Janice to stop working.  “He turned his head quickly to look at her as if he expected resistance.  He got none.  ‘Yes, I’ll quit working, and be a real wife.'”  As a modern reader, this is a bit of a let down for me.

Just before returning Van’s love, Janice sends Howard a telegraph saying they’re through.  Betty had been finally willing to move forward with the divorce but now…?  There’s no resolution there, and it’s just as well.  The Ring Costs a Dime simultaneously uses marriages of convenience as a major plot element and lightly condemns such unions, warning that they may stick for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.

Announcement:  I’m participating in an online group exhibit with the Grolier Club this summer!  For the exhibit, I’ve shared three books, two of which haven’t been previously shared on this blog.  The New Members Collect 2020 exhibit can be found here.  Please check it out and as always, thanks for reading!

Copies of Rob Eden’s works are available for purchase here.

Sally’s Shoulders

Earlier in the year, I wanted to kick off the Roaring Twenties in style.  I gravitated towards one of the books on my shelves with great flapper fringe dress cover art, Sally’s Shoulders by Beatrice Burton, published in 1927.

Part of my Beatrice Burton collection, this book was purchased in 2019 from Brian Cassidy a few months before he and Rebecca Romney founded Type Punch Matrix.  Speaking of, Type Punch Matrix released their first print catalog this spring, and I highly recommend taking a look at it here.

Sally’s Shoulders promises “a story of unjust burdens carried with a smile” and delivers just that!  What I read was just under 350 pages of Sally Jerome getting constantly dumped on.

At the start of the book, Sally lives with her mother, brother, and sister in a crowded flat. She takes care of all of the housekeeping (cleaning, cooking, sewing, etc.) and holds down a part-time job with Mr. Peevey, who is nearly exactly as he sounds.  Every member of the Jerome family is useless.  Sally’s brother and sister, who we’ll get to later, also work but are spendthrifts who rely on Sally to pay the rent and often bum funds off of her.  Sally’s father left the family when Sally was a child, because Sally’s mother did a poor job of keeping house.  Gosh forbid he learn to cook or clean.  Instead, he just up and left.

One exception I take to Burton’s characterization of the Jerome family is Sally’s mother.  Sally’s mother suffers from poor health, and sits around all day reading contemporary novels (e.g. Showboat by Edna Ferber).  It’s more or less stated in the book that Mrs. Jerome is either faking her symptoms, or would be cured if she only ate better and exercised more.  What a flaming heap of garbage!  I’m not a doctor, and Mrs. Jerome is a fictional character, but I know that many real people with chronic illnesses often hear this, and it’s bogus.  Mrs. Jerome could easily have a chronic illness, perhaps one that wasn’t easily diagnosed in 1927, and through that lens, her treatment in this novel isn’t entirely fair, even if she is a very manipulative character.

Beau Jerome, Sally’s good-for-nothing brother, has a storyline that illustrates some of what I found frustrating about this book.  He’s endlessly enabled by Sally and her mother.  One storyline involves Beau asking his neighbor for a $10 check, tampering it to be $110, and when confronted, writes the neighbor a check back for the $110, which bounces.  When the neighbor confronts Sally, she borrows the funds from her employer, which will take her about a year of garnished wages to pay off, and gives the money to Beau to return to the neighbor.  Beau promptly skips town with the funds, eloping with his girlfriend.  Later, he steals and gambles away $1,000 from the bank where he works (Sally asks, “One grand?  How much is that?” – it was still a relatively new idiom) and Sally goes back to the same employer to get those funds for him to replace before it’s noticed.  The employer gifts her the funds, and that storyline magically drops.  Then Beau begins running around with other women, after his wife Mabel gets an office job to pay for things and get out of the home.  Sally is left to care for their baby.  This storyline ends in the so-called sensible aunt advising Mabel, “You never should have worked a day in an office after you became Beau’s wife.  You should have become a clinging vine – a very clinging vine.  You should have thrown all the responsibility on Beau” (329).  His storyline is resolved with the implication it’s now Mabel’s responsibility to make Beau honest, and that by cleaning their home and not working, she’ll accomplish this.  Yeah, right.

Sally’s sister, Millie, snaps up the love interest of the story that Sally had been mooning over since page ten.  She picks up a few gentlemen suitors and attempts to play them all off of each other, which eventually backfires.  Her story wraps up when she writes that she’s married a rich man from Buenos Aires, and could she please have the family silver?

Sally’s dancing skills are a minor aspect of the story for about the first 200 pages.  Leading up to that, Aunt Emily launches a restaurant business out of her home and Sally begins to work for her.  The restaurant more or less has a tumbleweed rolling through it and is about to go out of business when Sally’s neighbor friend recommends she dances.  She does, and business begins booming.  Her family responds by moving into the inn uninvited and bumming even more money off of her, all while shaming her for dancing in public.

The rejected suitor role in Sally’s Shoulders is Ted, Sally’s neighbor friend who continually hits on her and doesn’t take no for an answer.  He first proposes when Sally is working in the kitchen, and more or less says that he wants her to clean his kitchen instead.  Ted is often handsy with unwanted advances.  The final time Sally rejects his offer of marriage, she lets him have it, but not in a way I would have found cathartic after 300-plus pages of his nonsense.  She calls him out because he would want her to continue to work and earn an income.  “It was all YOUR idea that you’d marry me and give me two jobs instead of one!  No thanks!  When I get married I expect to work hard at my own job of being a wife and raising a family – and I expect a man who’ll see things the way I do…  I still want to be the old-fashioned kind of woman who makes pies, scrubs floors on her knees, and goes to market pushing a baby carriage” (321-322).

Sally’s supposed love interest, John Nye, has spent most of the book dating Millie.  He doesn’t have many interesting qualities about him, but he’s rich, tall, and good-looking, so he’s the prize of the novel.  One of his first demonstrated acts of interest in Sally is when he literally shakes her and scolds her for dancing in public.

In the final hundred pages of Sally’s Shoulders, there’s a lot of hand-wringing about Sally dancing in public.  Sally enjoys dancing, she’s good at it, and it saves her aunt’s business from certain ruin.  That doesn’t stop her from getting dragged through the mud for it, with one of her suitors (the one who told her to dance in the first place! what nerve!) that men watching her dance is, “like flies crawling all over you, somehow” (314).  It’s finally concluded that Sally’s dancing has transformed the business, the one literally named “The House by the Side of the Road” into a roadhouse, which is unacceptable.  After catching on that their patrons are breaking prohibition laws, Aunt Emily cracks down on her patrons, fires the band, and closes her business.

Finally, John Nye comes around and sweeps Sally off of her feet.  It’s rather sudden, and is supposed to be our happy ending.  However, considering that Sally is still giving her family all of her money and hasn’t established any personal boundaries with them, the happy ending rings hollow.  John Nye has plenty of money, sure, but the reader is left with the feeling that his fortune will be squandered away by the extended Jerome family.

I started this book for the cover art, but stayed with it for its prohibition side-narrative and frustrating views on female performance and the male gaze. I’m glad I have Sally’s Shoulders in my collection, and I’m glad I’ve read it.

Copies of Beatrice Burton’s works are available for purchase here.

Determining Editions: The Flapper Wife

Back in February, in what feels like a different lifetime, I began thinking more about my copy of The Flapper Wife by Beatrice Burton.  I had been reading a different Burton title, which I really ought to review on this blog soon, and I had thought it suspect that the 1927 book I was reading was listed on the back panel of the dust jacket of my so-called 1925 copy of The Flapper Wife.

Here’s the thing about my copy of The Flapper Wife:  based on the copyright page alone, it appears to be a first edition.  The copyright lists 1925, and no additional printings.

I did some digging, back when things were still open.  My goal was to construct a mini-census of copies of The Flapper Wife to see how many variant printings I could find, all with identical copyright pages.  I reached out to a handful of special collections libraries with The Flapper Wife, and some wrote back.  Thank you, Michigan State University and Ohio State University!  However, I found that I had better luck finding dust jacketed copies of The Flapper Wife through booksellers.  I’d like to share what I’ve learned.  (And please excuse any wonky formatting!)

Courtesy of Between the Covers-Rare Books, Inc., New Jersey

 

 

This is Variant A.  It’s the true first edition of The Flapper Wife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Variant B, my copy of The Flapper Wife.  It’s a reprint.  Based on the titles listed and other books in my collection with the same panel, my best guess is that this reprint is from late 1927 or 1928.

 

 

 

Courtesy of Princeton Antiques Bookshop

 

This is Variant C.  Again, my best guess based on titles listed and books in my collection with this same panel design would place this reprint around 1929.

 

 

That confirms it.  My copy of The Flapper Wife is definitely a reprint.  While the completist, perfectionist side of me is disappointed, I still think I have a great copy.  It’s in fantastic condition and has a really cool bookseller sticker from P.O. News Stand in Montana, as found in Dingman, pg. 65.  I even located the original owner in the census!  And if that’s not good enough for me, then it’s fair to say that I got what I paid for back in 2011.

Even if I’m happy with my reprint copy of The Flapper Wife, let this also be a cautionary tale to us collectors, librarians, booksellers, or other interested parties out there.  All editions of The Flapper Wife have an identical copyright page, no matter the printing.  Buyer beware!  I recommend asking for a picture of the back panel of the dust jacket before assuming a copy of The Flapper Wife is actually a first edition.

Now we know there are at least three variants of The Flapper Wife “out there.”  If anyone reading this (collectors, institutions, booksellers, etc.) has a dust jacketed copy of The Flapper Wife, please let me know if your dust jacket’s back panel is different from the three pictured above, or just give a shout out to which edition you have.  I’d be very interested to hear about it.

And of course, I owe a big thank you to Between the Covers – Rare Books Inc., ABAA and to Princeton Antiques Bookshop for helping me with this post.  Both booksellers promptly responded to my research inquiry and have graciously provided the images shown above.   Thank you again!

Party Girl

Oh, Party Girl.  Come for the silly title, stay for the (unsatisfying) discussion of double standards and the modern women’s experience.  Also, for those of us who like Midwestern settings, Party Girl takes place in Terre Haute, Indiana!

Party Girl: a Love Story is a Chelsea House publication.  Chelsea House printed many excellent fiction works, usually subtitled, “An Adventure Story,” or “A Detective Story,” or “A Love Story,” or “A Western Story.”  Since I collect romance novels, I look for the “A Love Story” titles exclusively, and I’ve found them to be more difficult to locate than the Grosset and Dunlap first edition fiction.  A grand total of one library lists this book in OCLC.  Like the Grosset and Dunlap titles, many of the Chelsea House novels have been serially published.  The copyright page of Party Girl only mentions “1929,” but after a little big of digging, I’ve found that the wonderful FictionMags Index Family lists that Party Girl was serially published in the pulp Love Story Magazine (Street & Smith Corporation) starting in v. 67 #1, dated September 28, 1929, weeks before the stock market crashed.  The index also mentions that “Vivian Grey” is a pseudonym for Harry Walter Anderson, although I haven’t been able to find evidence of that in the Library of Congress Name Authority Records.

The basic premise of Party Girl is that Carol “Melody” Sprague returns home late one night with Kent Mayburn, is refused entrance to her home by her father who is sick of her late night adventures, then Kent Mayburn pronounces that he could never marry a “party girl,” and Melody is left to pick up the pieces.  When she’s refused entrance at home, Melody assumes her beau Kent will marry her immediately, which leads to a painfully awkward interchange.  But no, Kent, who has been out with Melody many late nights, and kissed her many times, declares he’s looking for “the right sort of girl – an old-fashioned girl.”  He rejects Melody because he’s already enjoyed her company, but considers “sweet and shy and never been kissed” to be marriage material.  Kent is the worst.

For any readers wondering what Melody’s “party girl” offenses include, the book does list them!  See if any sound familiar to you… I won’t judge (shame):  “She had been gay, perhaps too gay.  She had danced and flirted, laughed at jokes that perhaps would have been better blushed at.  She had been daring.  She had been the first one to slip out of her dress at Lila Longstreth’s party and dive into the pool in moonlight…  Hers had been the first legs to go stockingless in her crowd.  Her sports dresses were always a bit shorter and more extreme than any of the other girls, and her evening dresses a bit longer and more exotic” (33).

Thoroughly without options, Melody spends one heartbroken night at Kent’s apartment while he goes to a hotel, and then she temporarily moves in with Willie Estabrook.  Willie is a girl-friend of Melody’s who benefitted extensively from Melody’s generosity while she was securing the affections of her husband Tommy, and not to mention his family’s fortune.  Willie has a cold personality and is a minor villain of the book, which I don’t feel is entirely fair.  Sure, she’s not the warmest, most supportive friend, but who wouldn’t be a little exasperated at the house guest who overstays her welcome?  Melody stays at Willie’s for about three weeks without making plans to leave, racks up a huge shopping debt her father refuses, causing creditors to call the Estabrook home, and she also catches the eye of Willie’s brother-in-law, Broddy.  When Willie finally turns Melody out, granted on short notice, Melody reacts by telling Willie they were never really friends to begin with.  Ouch.

During this time, Kent dates and becomes engaged to Agatha, who is several years younger than Melody and presumably more innocent.  Most of the novel is a rehashing of Melody being unable to go home, being heartbroken over Kent, being jealous of Agatha, and then dodging Broddy’s advances.  However, trouble is clearly ahead when one character says of Agatha, “Still water runs deep, baby, and there’s a whole lot of mud at the bottom of it” (129).  It turns out that Agatha had been cheating on Kent with a man twenty years older than her, and asks Melody to take the fall for it when Kent discovers them together.  The truth eventually comes out and Kent and Melody get their happily ever after, but the whole Agatha story line feels like a cop out to me.

At one point, Melody asks her friend Willie, “What’s wrong with me?  I haven’t done anything that the rest of you haven’t done a dozen times” (145).  In a story about double standards and whether or not an experienced man wants a “sweet and shy and never been kissed” wife, it’s a dodge that the character who is supposed to be that role in fact isn’t.  As a 2019 reader, I wanted Kent to realize he loved Melody because he loved Melody, not because Agatha’s a cheater.  Do we get that ending?  Yes and no.  The first time Kent returns to Melody he says to her, “You’re out and aboveboard with everything.  You have kissed more of the fellows than I like to know you have, but it’s out where every one’s seen it.  You haven’t gone to their apartments,” (194-195) and she turns him away.  The time that sticks, Kent instead declares, “I just thought that I wanted that kind of girl [meaning Agatha], but I didn’t… I do know what I want.  I want you and I must have you”  (220).

So, does Kent have his happily ever after with Melody because he’s seen the error of his ways, or because she’s a “good girl” after all, or somewhere in-between?  For 1929, the ambiguity will have to be good enough.  Oh, and Melody’s father also takes her back to complete her happy ending.

Bonus:  It seems worth noting that the male lead character names really threw me off in Party Girl, as they’re nearly identical to Blind Date by Vida Hurst.  In Blind Date, the lead romantic interest is Kenton and the other suitor is Roddy.  At one point in both books (B)roddy even offers to pay off a debt that the main character acquired from an unwise shopping binge.  What book is this again?

Copies of other books published by Chelsea House are available for purchase here.

Triplicate Cover Art – and an Announcement!

Sometimes when I buy a book, I have already seen a picture of it and know what I’m getting.  Other times, if the book is described as being in very good condition or better, I’ll buy it “blind” and hope for a great surprise when it arrives.  When I bought Glittering Girl, it was the first time I had ever seen the American edition in dust jacket available for sale and I bought it “blind” hoping for a really unique cover.  That didn’t happen.

And so, I present, not duplicate covers, but triplicate covers.  Better yet, two of these books are written by May Christie.  She wrote a different book only to land the same cover art she had half a dozen years previously.  Love’s Ecstasy was published in 1928, and Glittering Girl was published in 1934, the same year as this edition of Emilie Loring’s With Banners.  Three books, same Skrenda cover art girl.

Next, I have an exciting announcement to make:  tomorrow, Saturday, August 11th, I will be a guest on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook livestream.  Rare Book Cafe starts at 2:30 EST and lasts for about an hour, and will be available on replay after that.  We’ll be talking anything and everything about 1920s-1930s romance novels as well as book collecting in general.  It should be a fun show, and I hope some blog readers will be able to tune in!

Substitute Sweetheart

“Suppose you loved a man with all your heart and he, while terribly ill wanted you to marry him, thinking you were another girl – Would you do it?”

That is the totally ridiculous question that leads the front panel summary of Substitute Sweetheart by Priscilla Wayne a.k.a. Besse Toulouse Sprague.  I mean, who hasn’t been in that very situation?

Substitute Sweetheart was published in 1936 by John H. Hopkins & Son, Inc.  It opens with a fashionable woman sitting on a plane and then explains how she got there through a flashback.  The C.L.W. dust jacket art depicts our protagonist, Ruth Drayton, at the airport and in her new coat purchased for the trip ahead.  My guess is that C.L.W. stands for Charles L. Wrenn, who illustrated other dust jackets for Hopkins around this time.

Ruth Drayton lives in Iowa and works as a clerk at a department store when one day, two strangers offer her employment that seems too good to be true.  This isn’t the first novel reviewed on this blog where the heroine is offered a gig that pays suspiciously well with all expenses covered – and new outfits – for just the teensy task of pretending to be someone else and executing some kind of manipulative plan.  Joseph and Clara Bradley will pay Ruth $500 dollars a week (according to an inflation calculator, that’s nearly $9k in 2018 currency) if she travels with them to Chicago and pretends to be the step-sister of a man who was recently in a car accident.  His real step-sister is “in quarantine,” because that’s not suspicious at all.  Like what happened in Blond Trouble, our protagonist accepts this shady proposition and then feels really good about her choices based on her new wardrobe.

Ruth’s actual brother Jerry scolds her over the phone not to take the job, but of course she does because otherwise Substitute Sweetheart wouldn’t be much a a story.  When she gets there, the job is sketchier than even Jerry could have imagined.  Joseph and Clara Bradley are criminals (and it’s revealed Clara Bradley once shot a dog for ruining her dress!) who have blackmailed a doctor into slowly poisoning their nephew in a plot to take his money since the hit-man they hired to drive him off the road didn’t kill him.  The Bradleys keep Ruth locked up and monitor her every move.  Their hired man accomplice, Pascoe, is incredibly creepy, like shudder-worthy creepy.

Jerry tracks the Bradleys down just as the blackmailed doctor gets cold feet about the plot, and there is a spectacular scene at the Bradley mansion where Joseph Bradley shoots the doctor, Ruth finally is able to phone the police, Pascoe disappears, and the Bradleys kidnap Jerry.  The whole last fifth of Substitute Sweetheart is the plot’s resolution.  Jerry saves the day all the way out in a remote Colorado cabin, and Pascoe and the Bradleys are finally brought to justice while Ruth quickly clears her name back in Chicago.

Pascoe’s unwanted affection towards Ruth isn’t the only sordid part of this love story.  There’s the attempted murder scheme that makes up this novel’s plot, but there’s also the love interest, Jim Bradley.  He doesn’t do much of anything for the span of the novel although to be fair, he’s also bedridden, temporarily blinded, and poisoned.  I find it unsettling that he’s attracted to his step-sibling’s doppleganger, even though the book mentions by page sixteen that they’re not actually related.  Jim claims at the end of the novel that he quickly knew Ruth wasn’t the real June, but she was similar enough to pass for June among the Bradley family inner circle.  To make it even worse, the real June emerges at the end of the story… to be picked up by Ruth’s brother.  What’s with these guys?

Copies of Priscilla Wayne’s works are available for purchase here.

Evolution of the Sparkling Romances of The Modern Girl

2018 is now in full swing.  In late January I wrapped up my commitments to my regional Mock Newbery and Caldecott committees (and introduced a book for Newbery!) and February kicked off a regional Teen Literature Reading Challenge that I join every year in the hopes of out-reading friendly rivals.  On top of that, I’m still not fully happy with my latest book review.  Instead of further editing that post (it’s coming eventually, I swear) or launching into the Teen Lit Reading Challenge, I decided to embark on a larger project involving all Grosset and Dunlap first edition romances.  Who else has ever done something super useful while putting off another thing?

Earlier tonight, I started pulling books from my shelves to photograph the advertisements for the Grosset and Dunlap project.  At first, I was just looking for the cleanest example of each advertising panel but then I started noticing patterns.  Before tonight, I assumed whatever advertising panel was on the back of my book was random or from a very loose era at best and never paid close attention to it.  That was a mistake.  It turns out, each year roughly corresponds to a separate advertising panel.

The photo at the top of this post is in chronological order with 1929 on the left and 1934 on the right.

Each year has its own advertising panel design for the Grosset and Dunlap romances.  The titles advertised sometimes change throughout the year, but the overall design remains the same.  Also, I’m finding a few straggler titles per year with the old design of the previous year.  For example, the 1931 design does have a few 1932 published titles.  The 1933 photographic design appears to be short-lived, as the final design on the right is a mixture of 1933 and 1934 publications.

Before these shared panels rolled out, my 1929 and earlier Grosset and Dunlap titles have either an author feature advertisement on the back (e.g Beatrice Burton, Vida Hurst, May Christie) or a unique panel.  A few of those authors, like Beatrice Burton, were more likely to continue to have her own advertising panel into the era of the “Sparkling Romance of the Modern Girl” dust jackets.  Around 1934, as the Grosset and Dunlap first edition romances began their sunset, a few were produced with photographic panels displaying characters in a dramatic pose from the novel.

So readers, now we know.  Tonight I learned a new party trick:  how to tell with reasonable accuracy what year a Grosset and Dunlap title was published just by looking at the rear panel of the dust jacket.  Higher quality photos of the dust jackets will have to wait until I roll out my larger project.  This is, after all, a work night.

See if the dust jacket advertising panel pattern matches more examples!  Copies of 1929-1934 Grosset and Dunlap romance novels are available here.

Fall 2017 News – Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize

Happy Thanksgiving weekend!  In addition to being grateful for good food, wonderful company, and elastic waistbands, there’s something else I’ve been grateful for in 2017.  It’s taken me a while to write about it, and I think word has already gotten around, but I won the inaugural Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize.

I’m incredibly grateful to Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney of Honey & Wax for starting this prize.  Even before I knew I had won, it was a really great opportunity to update my files on my collection, and yes, work on my bibliography.  The bibliography that I first started in 2012 has been growing intermittently over the years.  It’s still not fully updated, but it is currently just shy of thirty pages.  The Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize asked for a fifty book maximum, so I picked fifty favorites and revisited those entries.  It was pretty intense.  It felt like I had cranked the “book nerd” dial to eleven as I started tracking down census records, closed department stores, and even old addresses.

Side by side with my 2012 NCBCC entry, it was really something to see how much had changed in five years.  A side note to blog readers who know me or my family personally, I entered the contest on July 13, 2017.

Heather called with the good news in September, and I was super excited to see the announcement in the Paris Review.  I had fun surprising my mom with that news.  Since then, I’ve had a super busy fall.  To all new blog readers who came to this blog through the Paris Review or subsequent coverage, welcome and I promise to have a new book review up shortly!

Over the past few months, several articles have covered different aspects of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize as well as my collection.  There are still a few more articles in the works, which I’ll continue to add here as they roll out:

• The Paris Review
• The Fine Books Blog
• Bustle
• Melville House Blog
• The New Antiquarian

The Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize is an annual award for women book collectors aged thirty and under.  Read more about the contest here.  The deadline for next year’s contest is June 1, 2018.

Blind Date

“What must a girl do to be popular?”

Cynthia Carter couldn’t get a date to her town’s Valentine’s dance and has just been stood up in the worst way.  A blind date scuttled off after pretending to be called away, only everyone could see he had been holding down the receiver on the landline.  What happens next makes up the plot of Blind Date by Vida Hurst, published in 1931  with dust jacket art by Mach Tey.

This is the second Vida Hurst book to be covered on this blog, the first being No Such Girl.  Like No Such Girl, Blind Date features an incredibly naive young protagonist making groan-inducing choices, and is set away from the east coast.  No Such Girl is set in Michigan, and Blind Date is set in Missouri.  How many other 1930s romance novels are set in Kansas City, Missouri?  After having recently visited there for a literary-themed wedding, I think Kansas City is a great choice for a romance novel.

Our three main suitors are Kenton Field, Roddy Nelson, and Houston Harrison.  Kenton is the boy next door, Roddy is the date-dodger and Houston is the family friend.  Of the three suitors, Cynthia can’t get rid of Houston quickly enough.  She describes him as, “the sort who, after knowing a girl for years, would ask permission to hold her hand” and scoffs at his beautiful “feminine” handwriting.  The turning point with Houston is when Cynthia turns him down for an evening out, and then, upon being asked to go, Cynthia’s older sister turns him down too.  Considered an old maid in her late twenties(!), Hollis stands up for herself and refuses to be “second choice.”  Houston is then stuck going with the sisters’ MOM.  After learning that Cynthia isn’t interested and Hollis doesn’t want to be second choice, Houston changes his tactics and before the novel ends he and Hollis are married and expecting a baby.  Maybe Cynthia was wrong in her previous estimation of Houston.

Houston wouldn’t be the only character Cynthia misjudges.  After her friends dismiss Roddy following his landline stunt, Cynthia continues to pine away for another two hundred pages.  Deciding she would like to be the sort to impress men, our protagonist embarks on a self-improvement mission.

In Cynthia’s quest for fashion greatness, Blind Date has a subplot I hadn’t read before in a 1930s romance: a cautionary tale about store credit charges.  Cynthia opens a line of credit and immediately charges $434.95 in clothing purchases.  If that sounds like a lot, take inflation into consideration too.  According to one inflation calculator, that would be about $6,890 today!  Her inability to pay this off makes her creditor’s escalation a driving force of the plot.  She finds out what it means to have her credit ruined in town at other stores, and almost loses her job.  After having learned hard lessons about buying clothing out of her price range, Cynthia takes out a high interest loan and makes good on her debt.  She also decides to wear only black, white, blue, and pink, for whatever that’s worth.

Despite limiting herself to four clothing colors and getting into debt, the most cringe-worthy choices Cynthia makes are about Roddy Nelson.  He’s jealous and sleazy throughout the novel.  He lies about being engaged to another woman and just about everything else.  Cynthia’s infatuation with him ends in a change of heart, and she instead ends up with the boy next door who had been listening to her problems for the length of the novel.  Just to drive the point about fashion home, Cynthia is wearing a dark plain flannel bathrobe (color not specified!) for her happy ending with Kenton.

Blind Date was made into a 1934 movie by the same name, starring Ann Sothern, Neil Hamilton, and Paul Kelly.

Copies of Vida Hurst’s works are available for purchase here including Blind Date.

Kaleidoscope Books

2017

2011

Back in the fall of 2010, I had a part-time student job that really wasn’t me.  On the surface, I couldn’t complain: I worked with great people, I had a reasonable supervisor, and the pay was decent for a part-time student job.  The work itself was the poor fit, but for the record I did my job dutifully until the day Jeff Pickell saved me from it.

Kaleidoscope Books was my go-to place that fall.  I had long talks with Jeff, the owner, about anything and everything as I escaped from some of the pressures of my first semester in grad school.  For everyone else who has been drawn to Kaleidoscope, we all know that my descriptions of Jeff, his store, and the good times there can’t do any of them justice.  Having a bad day?  I would have recommended going to Kaleidoscope.  A good day?  Kaleidoscope.  Not any kind of day but just generally putzing about the Kerrytown area?  Kaleidoscope.

Luckily for me, Jeff had an opening because his previous assistant’s first book had been published and was a serious contender for the 2011 Caldecott Medal, which it went on to win.  Those are some pretty large shoes to fill, but Jeff was willing to take a chance on a twenty-two year old grad student who rambled on a bunch about 1920s romance novels.

I started working odd hours in the store late that fall and went to work there regularly as Jeff’s Online Business Manager starting in January of 2011.  We took our descriptions and listings seriously, but always had fun with them.  They’d say something like “this book about orange cats, a favorite subject of a Kaleidoscope employee…” or “the owner and his assistant disagree on whether this book is in near fine or fine condition – purchase now and cast your vote.”  Together we listed nearly 1,000 items that year.

In 2013, I moved out of state but tried to visit Jeff at Kaleidoscope Books anytime I was in Michigan.  My most recent visit to Kaleidoscope Books was in November 2016, when Jeff surprised me with some news.  He was retiring, and a majority of the store was going to auction in 2017.

Kaleidoscope Books was all about its people, and its books.  Everyone was welcome and friends stopped by regularly.  Needless to say, I also purchased some really special books from Kaleidoscope.  In December of 2016, my boyfriend surprised me with a final few books from the store.

I had said goodbye to the store as I had known it back in November, but I couldn’t miss the auction.  I needed to see the store off in style.  So, I woke up early one unseasonably pleasant February morning and headed to the Saline Fairgrounds with my mom and Daniel.  Nearly the whole gang was there.  It was bittersweet, seeing some familiar faces I hadn’t seen in nearly four years.  Even the old weatherbeaten outdoor sign was in attendance, one of many, many items in three full warehouses.  My mom was ready to go before I was, and Daniel stayed with me so I could get the visual closure of seeing an auctioneer selling items table by table.  It was my first auction, and a lot to wrap my head around.  Finally, I said farewell (for now!) to Jeff, Deborah, and Isaac before taking the picture at the top left of this post.  The top right picture is from 2011.

It was tough saying goodbye to a place that means so much to me.  But this also marks the beginning of Jeff’s much-deserved retirement, a new chapter and the next adventure.  Today, June 5th, is Jeff’s birthday and this post is for him.  Happy Birthday, Jeff!  And thank you, for everything.

… Missing the experience of buying a book from Kaleidoscope Books?  Good news!  Kaleidoscope Books may no longer be in Kerrytown, but a curated subset of its inventory is available online at Abebooks!  The digital storefront can be found at: https://www.abebooks.com/kaleidoscope-books-collectibles-ann-arbor-mi/55605396/sf.