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1937 · ref. 14680 — New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Near Fine in Very Good dj. c.1937. First Edition. Hardcover. a lovely clean copy with no significant wear but the very faintest spotting to the bottom page edges less squinty eyes would call it Fine with nary a pause; jacket lightly soiled at the rear panel with some light wear and a couple of tiny tears along the top edge very attractive nonetheless. "A Panoramic Novel" sayeth the dust jacket -- which is another way of saying that the ever-popular Miss Baldwin or her publishers was not above pulling one of the oldest New-York-novelist tricks in the book that of concocting a stew of "interrelated stories" about a wide array of urban characters from sophisticated Social Register types to "racketeers taxi-drivers maids actors secretaries and interns" in the hope that it would magically bubble into a novel with a unifying central theme. The double-copyright date though 1936 and 1937 blows its cover: all eight stories in this book were published in Cosmopolitan as novelettes most under the same titles from October 1936 through May 1937; were they "interrelated" at that point I wonder or was their anthologization the equivalent of a literary shotgun marriage One story by the way "Comet Over Broadway" was filmed under that title in 1938. And just to tie up the packaging in a nice neat bow at the very end of the book is a three-page preview of her next novel "Twenty-Four Hours a Day" also blurbed on the rear jacket flap. . Farrar & Rinehart hardcover books