Description
Harper & Brothers, Published 1950. Hardcover, xiv, 229 pp.; 22 cm; First Edition; illustrated with drawings by Alice Harvey.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Tan cloth boards with drawing in brown on front cover, green cloth spine lettered in black. Mild shelf wear, some toning and soiling along lower edge of front cover. Binding tight. Endpapers toned, with darker bands along hinges. Gift inscription in blue ink dated Xmas 1950 on front free endpaper. Pages lightly toned, otherwise unmarked; rough-cut fore-edges. Illustrated dust jacket in green, rust and black, $2.75 on front flap, No. 3433 on rear panel. Spine toned with small chips at head and foot, edge wear, small chips at corners, small tears and creasing along top edges, creases at spine folds. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Memoir of five years in Chicago after the Kimbrough family moved from Muncie, Indiana, when the author was eleven; companion to How Dear to My Heart, her account of Muncie. Includes chapters on hotel and apartment life, a new school, Mary Garden's Carmen and the family's Waverly electric, with Jackson Park, the Midway and the Illinois Central as settings. The jacket flap also lists Douglas Fairbanks doing handstands on the beach and a stay-up-all-night party for Halley's Comet. Kimbrough co-wrote Our Hearts Were Young and Gay with Cornelia Otis Skinner. Alice Harvey (1894-1983), born in Austin, Illinois, was one of the first women cartoonists at The New Yorker, with more than 160 drawings and 3 covers between 1925 and 1943. Her jacket drawing shows the family arriving at a train station; the front cover and frontispiece show one of the Art Institute of Chicago lions. Copyright page states First Edition with Harper's date code I-Z (September 1950); Kirkus gives publication as October 18, 1950. Contents: Preface; Chicago and Uneeda; City Excursion; Family Hotel; Our Club; The Other Side of the Tracks; Visitors from Home; Brother's Social Life; Brother's Cultural Life; Brother's Financial Life; Opening Day; Open Sesame; My Friend; A Rustic and a Fairy; Close to Nature; Mary Garden's Carmen, and Brother's; Our Waverly; Graduation.