A Bridge Melodrama; Every Player Your Partner. Pat. No. 1558838

New York: Chas. S. Clark Co, 1931. Boxed. Very Good. Theatre as camp, before, we believe, the phrase, "camp", even existed or was a thing. Also issued when bridge, a game in its current form not even a decade old at the time, was sweeping the country and was incontrovertibly a craze. And of course, as anyone who plays bridge can attest, the game is full of drama, much of which comes from the behavior, emotions, reactions, and ancillary interaction of the players immersed in the game. The set is for a sort of social bridge that is played with four tables, with elements of duplicate bridge therefore, but not duplicate, and adding some spice with its allusions to theater stages and theater actors. The lidded box it comes is 11 by 19 cm, and slightly more than 2 cm in height. The lid's top has an illustration, meant to be droll, of a murder victim in top hat, a woman fainting intothe arm's of a brawny man, and another woman, probably the "other woman", at the door. This illustration is on all four of the score cards within, all of which are folded sheets of a light card stock, but which are named after different theaters: the Grand Opera House, the Bowery Theatre, the Old Rialto Theatre, and the Bijou Theatre. Inside these cards are the scoring tables, and the back of each sets forth the basic rules of contract bridge. Then there are sixteen cards, each with the name of a fictive actor such as Fannie Lightfoot, Jakie Otto, Claire V. Armond, Huldah Delmarte, etc. etc. And the cards also refer to plays, with titles made up for the game, such as "More to Be Pitied than Scorned" and "The Curse of Drink". Atttached to these 16 smaller cards are strings. This is obviously a scarce item. There are no listings on OCLC First Search. The only copy we could locate otherwise was in Special Collections, Bowling Green State, which is in Ohio. The Charles S. Clark Co. appears to have been a prolific producer of bridge scoring cards or bridge paraphenalia. The box has some slight soil and wear, but it remains structurally sound. The contents are clean and unused.