Show Boat.
New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. Signed/Limited Edition. Quarter cream over green boards, titled and accented in gilt, teg, housed in publisher's slipcase with limitation spine label. 398pp. 8.75" x 6" Owner's bookplate, spine very slightly darkened and with minor crimp to upper spine tip, else fine in custom mylar cover and very good publisher's slipcase with some expert restoration to seams and a small chip along one edge. Item #139930
"AN IRRESISTIBLE STORY..."
Book collectors can easily rattle off the high spots of twentieth-century fiction with all points and states in place; the Mount Rushmore of writers holds firm in stature and value, mint copies of Fitzgerald passing from one collection to another, like faberge eggs, glittering on the shelf. The period had a rhythmic pulse that was alive, unfettered, modern: American fiction of the 1920s.
At that same time, Edna Ferber’s (1885-1968) novels were instant bestsellers, many of them memorably adapted by her to film, stage, and musical theater. In temperament she was more aligned with the Algonquins than the expatriates, her home base was NYC, not Paris, her favorite writer was Charles Dickens. She remained “popular” until her last novel in 1958. Show Boat remains one of her most enduringly influential novels, capturing the vanished world of life on the Mississippi river.
Doubleday Page had been publishing signed limited editions since the turn of the century, and a peek at the list of those for the decade of the 1920s reveals their taste for literary eclecticism that includes Conrad, Kipling, Tarkington, Conan Doyle, Ellen Glasgow, and Ferber. Limited to 201 signed and numbered copies (of which this is 86), distinguished by Ferber’s bold signature in turquoise ink, the vellum spine and green paper boards with gilt starburst corner devices, is a special invitation to experience a true storyteller’s gift 100 years later which, once started, is hard to resist.
Price: $850.00