The Sign of the Cross [Photoplay Edition]

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. [1932] (c1896, 1924). First Edition Thus. Hardcover. Near Fine in Very Good dj. [nice clean book with the faintest touch of shelfwear, vintage retailer's small label (Elder's) on rear pastedown; the jacket is bright and attractive, despite some edgewear, a few tiny tears and small bits of paper loss at the extremities, and a small but unsightly brown stain near the top of the rear panel (with a few tiny holes in the jacket at that point, probably as an unintended result of someone's attempt to remove the stain)]. (photographic endpapers) "Against a background of depravity, vice, intrigue and cruelty in Nero's court is laid this story of the pure love of a Christian girl and a Roman soldier. It is a thrilling, gripping romance of ancient Rome" that Cecil B. DeMille turned into a sprawling, gaudy epic of pre-Code Hollywood, with Fredric March and Elissa Landi as the pure lovers, but with Charles Laughton and Claudette Colbert stealing the show as the Emperor Nero and the asses'-milk-bathing Empress Poppaea. Orginally an enormously successful play in 1895, it was previously filmed by the Famous Players Film Company in 1914. I'm unclear when this particular novelized version was actually written, and by whom (playwright Barrett died in 1904); the book at hand also bears a 1924 copyright notice, attributed to Alfred William and Frank Andrew Barrett, his two sons. In keeping with common practice for early-Depression-era photoplay editions, the illustrations here are confined to the endpapers, rather than being bound in to the text as they generally were during the silent-film years. .