Arsenic and Old Lace; a comedy

New York: Random House. Very Good+. (c.1941). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, but encased in a nice-looking facsimile reproduction of the original first edition jacket; see 2nd image posted with this listing) [book has some modest staining to cloth along top edges of covers, age-toning to endpapers and pastedowns]. Hit comedy about a couple of dotty old ladies who also happen to be the nicest pair of homicidal maniacs you'd ever want to meet (although you wouldn't). A big hit on Broadway, where it ran for 1,444 performances over four seasons, it was turned into a rather frantic (but still enjoyable) 1944 film by director Frank Capra, (truncated) with Josephine Hull and Jean Adair reprising their stage roles as "Aunt Abby" and "Aunt Martha," ditto John Alexander as their batty cousin Teddy (who imagines he's Theodore Roosevelt). The first major change in casting involved the injection of some serious star power in the selection of Cary Grant to play the horrified nephew (replacing Allyn Joslyn, who had played the part on stage and was a perfectly decent actors, although let's be honest: he was no Cary Grant). The other change, while not quite as radical (substituting Raymond Massey for Boris Karloff as the sinister escaped criminal/black sheep Jonathan Brewster), it did rather mute one of the stage version's best gags -- i.e. that the character had undergone plastic surgery which, to his dismay, made him look "just like Boris Karloff." (They kept the line in the movie, but it didn't have nearly the comedic punch emerging from the mouth of Raymond Massey, although he still turned in a creditable performance.) NOTE again that this book bears a FACSIMILE dust jacket, which has not been factored in to our pricing. . (Inventory #: 29637)