Hardcover
1935 · New York
by O'Hara, John
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Very Good+. 1935. 2nd printing. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, but enfolded by a new professionally-produced FACSIMILE dust jacket) [a nice clean copy, with just a bit of smudging to the covers, light age-toning to the fore-edge, and a bit of the gilt spine lettering rubbed away]. O'Hara's surprisingly uncommon second book, collecting 37 stories, about one-third of the author's early magazine fiction (although as biography Frank MacShane pointed out, even though O'Hara's published work dated from 1928, most of the stories in this book had been published after 1932). Most of the tales range in length from five to nine pages, and were reprinted from such publications as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Scribner's Magazine. Per MacShane, "most of them are portraits of individuals or explorations of the relationship between two people --- a married couple, the owner of a Chinese restaurant and his waitress, two employees in an office, coproprietors of a coffee shop, people in a club." As the the scarcity of the book in today's marketplace -- which seems odd, given the big splash made by O'Hara's debut novel, "Appointment in Samarra," published the preceding summer -- I have only theories, no facts, so I'll keep them to myself. NOTE again that the dust jacket on this book is a FACSIMILE. .
(Inventory #: 28317)