Los Angeles in 7 Days; including Southern California

New York: Robert M. McBride & Company. Fair. 1932. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [worn at extremities with exposure of boards at tips, light external soiling, a bit of fraying to cloth at both ends of spine, front hinge cracked]. (frontispiece map) One of a series of such city guidebooks -- "The Seven Days Series" -- issued by this publisher in the 1920s and 1930s (there had also been volumes on New York, Boston, Chicago, Paris, Rome, and London, by different authors, and later books covered Berlin, Vienna, and Brussels), each blurbed as "A Guide for People in a Hurry." I don't know if this applies uniformly across the series, but the format of this one, at least, is utterly engaging: rather than being couched in a more-or-less-encyclopedic "reference" idiom, the whole thing is presented as a kind of running monologue by the authors (a husband and wife), delivered as they play hosts and tour guides to "a big Eastern publisher" who's visiting the city with his wife and young daughter. They take the little family -- "Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Jones" (of which we eventually learn the first name only of the latter, Annabelle) -- around the city on a week-long whirlwind tour in seven chapters ("Monday," etc.). Our authors style themselves within the narrative as "Mr. and Mrs. Guia" -- which the clever Mr. Jones figures out, right away, is Spanish for "Guide" -- and the conceit of the book is that they're trying to "get [the publisher] interested in the books we're trying to write!" It begins, appropriately, with a problem that plagues Angelenos to this day: parking. As the authors pull up across the street from the Biltmore Hotel, where they are to collect their tourists, "the missus" warns Mr. G that there's "only forty-five minutes' parking here" and suggests a nearby parking lot -- but he brushes her off, stating that "finding room at the curb right in the downtown block where we wanted to stop was too rare an opportunity to be slighted and I insisted on enjoying the thrill of it." If you're wondering (as I initially was) what caused the publishers to consider Los Angeles of the early 1930s to be on a touristic par with the other cities in this series (New York, London, Paris, et al.), the answer is right there in the year of publication: 1932, the year the Olympics came to town. (The book was published in March, and sure enough there are several pages devoted to the Olympic Village and other preparations for the upcoming Games.) NOTE that there were two variant printings of this book: one with a folding map of the city contained in a pocket affixed to the rear pastedown, the other without. This copy is WITHOUT the map. .