The Scarce Rare Book That Spawned "It's A Wonderful Life" Offered At $15,000

by Stephen J. Gertz

George said, “give me just one good reason why I should be alive.”

The little man made a queer chuckling sound. “Come, come, it can’t be that bad. You’ve got your job at the bank. And Mary and the kids. You’re healthy, young, and—”

“And sick of everything!” George cried. “I’m stuck here in this mudhole for life, doing the same dull work day after day. Other men are leading exciting lives, but I—well, I’m just a small-town bank clerk that even the army didn’t want. I never did anything really useful or interesting, and it looks as if I never will. I might just as well be dead. I might better be dead. Sometimes I wish I were. In fact, I wish I’d never been born!”

The little man stood looking at him in the growing darkness. “What was that you said?” he asked softly.

“I said I wish I’d never been born,” George repeated firmly. “And I mean it too.”

So begins The Greatest Gift: A Christmas Tale, a 4,100 word novella by American author, editor, and noted Civil War historian Philip Van Doren Stern (1900-1984), who began writing it in 1939 and finished in 1943. Publishers treated it as coal in their Christmas stockings; Stern could not find a home for the book. And so he privately printed it in a twenty-one page edition of 200 7.5 x 5.5 inch signed copies bound in orange wrappers and distributed them to friends for Christmas 1943.

It was ultimately published by David McKay in New York in 1944 with illustrations by Rafaello Busoni. Stern sold the magazine rights to Reader's Scope, which published the story in its December 1944 issue, and to Good Housekeeping, which published it under the title The Man Who Was Never Born in its January 1945 issue (on the streets in December 1944).

It was optioned by RKO studios for film adaptation in 1944. Ultimately produced by director Frank Capra's Liberty Films and released in 1946 under the title It's A Wonderful Life, the movie is now an American Christmas classic. But this, the true first edition of the book that started it all, has become quite scarce. Just in time for Christmas, however, a copy has come into the marketplace. Offered by Royal Books in Baltimore, the asking price is $15,000.

OCLC records seven copies of this edition in institutional holdings worldwide, with 193 copies theoretically left. But they appear to have left with Elvis, and, like the King (but more reliably reported), copies are only occasionally sighted this side of the heavenly veil. According to ABPC there has not been a copy seen at auction within at least the last thirty-seven years. A copy was offered in 2011 by Mullen Books in Pennsylvania. Who knows when another will surface?

Those for whom the screenplay to It's a Wonderful Life is a sacred text will be disappointed to learn that its protagonist, George Bailey, is George Platt in The Greatest Gift. There is no Bedford Falls. There is no Mr. Potter. And there is no Clarence Odbody, Angel-2d Class, just a mysterious, unnamed little man:

"He was stout, well past middle age, and his round cheeks were pink in the winter as though they had just been shaved…He was a most unremarkable little person, the sort you would pass in a crowd and never notice. Unless you saw his bright blue eyes, that is. You couldn’t forget them, for they were the kindest, sharpest eyes you ever saw. Nothing else about him was noteworthy. He wore a moth-eaten old fur cap and a shabby overcoat that was stretched tightly across his paunchy belly. He was carrying a small black satchel. It wasn’t a doctor’s bag - it was too large for that and not the right shape. It was a salesman’s sample kit, George decided distastefully. The fellow was probably some sort of peddler, the kind who would go around poking his sharp little nose into other people’s affairs."

In what will likely be a major bah humbug to Wonderful Life fans and horrifying to those who may not believe in Santa but definitely believe there's a war on Christmas, the unnamed little man does not earn his wings when a Christmas tree bell rings, nor is there any mention of heaven or angels. The Greatest Gift is a secular story with a Rod Serling twist at its end. You're traveling through another dimension: there's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: a Twilight Zone Christmas.
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You can read the full text of The Greatest Gift here.
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VAN DOREN STERN, Philip. The Greatest Gift. A Christmas Tale. New York: Privately Printed for Distribution to His Friends, Christmas, 1943. First edition, limited to 200 copies, each signed by the author. Octavo. 21 pp. Orange wrappers with printed title label. Near fine.

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With the exception of Clarence's note card, images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.
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Jim Tully, Forgotten Hobo Novelist, Finally Gets His Due

by Stephen J. Gertz

This week, Jim Tully (1886-1947), the hobo novelist who wrote hard-boiled before hard-boiled became Hard-Boiled and a distinctly American and unique prose style, is the subject of a long overdue celebration of his life and books.

The Tully festival, occurring in in Los Angeles, kicks-off on Wednesday evening October 10, 2012 with a 7:30 PM screening at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood of Laughter in Hell (1933), based upon Tully's novel of the same title, and, until recently, thought long-lost. Starring Pat O'Brien and a young, gorgeous pre-Titanic Gloria Stuart in this chain-gang melodrama, it's only one of two films adapted from Tully novels, the other being the early Talkie, Beggars of Life (1928). 

Tully, the Ohio-born son of an Irish ditch-digger,  hit the road in 1901 at age fifteen, spending most of his teenage years in the company of hoboes. While chasing his dream of becoming a writer, Tully rode the rails and worked as a tree surgeon, boxer, and newspaper reporter. All the while, he was crafting his memories into a dark and original chronicle of the American underclass. He ultimately exploded onto the scene with a stream of critically acclaimed novels, among them Beggars of Life (1924), Circus Parade (1927), Shanty Irish (1928), Shadows of Men (1930) and Blood on the Moon (1931). Tully’s novel Ladies In The Parlor (1935) was declared obscene and most copies were destroyed,

Authentic and the real deal, Tully drew Hollywood's attention and he became friends with W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon, Lon Chaney, Frank Capra, and Erich von Stroheim. Tully was a treasury of colorful anecdotes on two legs and what he didn't commit to paper spilled out of his mouth. Everyone in town wanted to share the company of this colorful individual.

By the mid-1940s, however, crippling physical ailments and personal heartbreak had the writer on the ropes. With his death in 1947, his name slipped from the front ranks of American Letters and into obscurity.

No more.

The Tully festival continues on Thursday, October 11th. Tully is subject of the Bonnie Cashin Lecture at UCLA (4 p.m.), in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit devoted to Tully,  The Life and Times of Jim Tully: From Drifter to Celebrated Author, in the UCLA Special Collections Dept., which holds Tully's papers.

On Sunday, October 14th at 3PM, starting out at Larry Edmunds Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, Tully biographers Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziaka will conduct a walking tour of Hollywood to show off Tully-themed locations.  

The festival wraps on Monday, October 15 from 6-11 PM at the Los Angeles Visionary Association's (LAVA) salon at Musso & Franks, the famed Hollywood Blvd restaurant and writers hangout, with a formal dinner themed "Jim Tully: A Hobo in Hollywood," and presentations by his biographers,  literary historian and rare book dealer Howard Prouty, and Hollywood historian Philip Mershon. Attendance  is limited; reserve your seat at the table now. This is a trés cool event.

The Jim Tully revival has begun in earnest. Prices for Tully first editions in dust jacket currently range from $175 - $1050. As of this writing an European dealer is currently offering a copy of Tully's banned and print-run destroyed Ladies of the Parlor w/o DJ for only $356; he doesn't know what he has. 

I expect that, like the first editions of once-obscure novelist John Fante after Charles Bukowski declared his love for the writer, Tully firsts will rise in value.

Jim Tully,  a missing link in the evolution of modern American literature, is no longer missing in action.

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In an amusing aside, the legendary "lost" status of Laughter in Hell turned out to be a case of  lazy researchers rather than gone-forever film.  A print had been sitting on a shelf in Universal's vault the whole time; nobody bothered to check. Enter Howard Prouty, ABAA proprietor of ReadInk and Acquisitions Archivist at The Academy Foundation / Margaret Herrick Library, who simply picked up the phone and called Universal. Voíla! Lost film found.

"Many saw the dark side of the American dream,
but none wrote about it like Jim Tully."

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All images courtesy of Howard Prouty, with our thanks.

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Tully's novels are now, finally, being reprinted, published by Black Squirrel Books, a division of Kent State University Press.

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Scarce Letters of Movie Pioneer Georges Méliès, Hero of Scorsese's "Hugo," Surface

by Stephen J. Gertz

[MÉLIÈs, Georges] BESSY, Maurice and Lo Duca.
Georges Méliès: Mage et "Mes Mémoires" par Méliès.
Paris: Prisma, 1945. First French Edition, never translated into English.
One of 2000 numbered copies, this being No. 956.
With Melies' business card from 1909 laid in.

Between 1928 and 1932, when pioneering film director, Georges Méliès, was running a toy shop in Montparnesse Station in Paris - the period in his life covered by Martin Scorsese's splendid homage to Méliès and movie magic, Hugo - Méliès wrote a series of  letters of enormous interest to film lovers and historians. The content of the letters is quite broad and uniformly fascinating throughout.

This trove has just come into the marketplace, offered by Royal Books in Baltimore. Surviving ephemeral material representing Méliès' work is excessively rare; letters in his hand are virtually non-existent. OCLC indicates that there is no institution with autograph material, and auction records show no appearance of any letters since 1975. Virtually all known surviving material is held by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.

From: A Trip To The Moon - Earth Rise.

An archive consisting  of six extraordinary signed autograph letters, five in French and one in English, by Méliès, generally considered to be one of the inventors of narrative cinema,  it reveals a great deal about his little-discussed but profoundly important origins in the Robert-Houdin Theatre in Paris, as well as his work as a magician and ultimately a film director. 

Equally interesting in these letters are various revelations regarding his character, great love for artists, magicians, and all performers whose work came under the umbrella of "illusion." His spirit, so finely captured by Scorsese on film, is animated on these pages.

Méliès began his career in theater at the Theatre Robert-Houdin, doing extremely creative work in an area that could be described as an intersection of live theater, pantomime, magic, and vaudeville. After seeing an 1895 demonstration by the Lumiere Brothers, he became very interested in cinema, and betweem 1896 and 1914 made over 500 short films. 

His film work utilized many of the elements from his live performance as a basis for content, and the portion of his work that has survived reveals a storytelling style that revels in Jules Verne-esque fantastical adventure fiction. The films ranged from 1 to 40 minutes in length, and many were completely abstract, with his intense interest in the effect of "illusion" on an audience that ultimately led to him becoming the inventor of "special effects." Importantly, the "effects" he invented on celluloid were not just a component of his cinema, they were the essence of it.

Equally important, Méliès made the first cinematic foray into science fiction and horror, and was a pioneer in the making of fantastical adventure films. Le Manoir du diable (The House of the Devil,"1896) and Le Caverna maudite ("The Cave of the Unholy One," 1898) are generally considered to be the first horror films ever made. A print of the former was acquired upon its release by Thomas Edison, who duplicated and distributed it with great financial success in the United States. Though Edison paid no royalties to Méliès, as a result the director's name became well-known to film-goers all over the Western world.

Six years later, Méliès produced what is today his most famous short feature, Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), the first known science fiction film, and the first to depict space travel. The film was based very loosely on two popular novels of the time, by Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells.

From: A Trip To The Moon - A Rocket In The Eye.

Méliès was forced into bankruptcy in 1913 by large French and American studios. Because the concept of film preservation was still nearly 20 years away, most of his films were ultimately melted down for boot heels during World War I or recycled to make new film.

The archive is divided into four  groups:

(a) A brief but extraordinary 1932 letter in English about his days as a filmmaker.

(b) A group of three letters from 1928 regarding his earliest days at Robert-Houdin Theatre, details regarding a series of short pieces he is writing about his life (for a magazine or newspaper), and a proposal to gather the pieces for publication in book form.

(c) A letter from 1929 regarding the proofs of caricatures that Méliès has drawn for the purpose of publication as postcards to be sold to fans of his work.

(d) A brief but significant letter from 1931 regarding the annual "magician's gala," mentioning several of the magicians who performed, a gathering of artists that was clearly at the heart of what preserved Méliès spirit during the years after his film company collapsed.

In the first letter, Melies writes candidly of his days as a filmmaker, and the collapse of his career: "You will find me every day, even Sundays, in the hall of Montparnasse station, from 10 o'clock A.M. to 10 P.M. I keep there a shop of toys and sweets, since I have unfortunately, lost 3 millions of francs during the war, which I had gained as a producer of motion pictures and pioneer of cinematography."

The next three letters represent the heart of the this archive, regarding Méliès' earliest days working as a magician in the Robert-Houdin Theatre. These letters deal in some detail with an ongoing memoir being written by Méliès, ending with a letter responding to a proposal for the memoirs to be expanded and published as a book.

From: A Trip To The Moon - Dream Sequence.

In the first letter, Méliès writes: "I think by now you must have received the first two articles... I   believe that information on the subject of the Robert-Houdin Theatre will interest your readers, so I won't hesitate to send more details... Today I constructed the exact floor plans of the stage and back stage from memory and I am enclosing them here. Your are right if you think that nothing that that happened in my little old theater has escaped my memory. With an average of 750 performances per year, that makes 27,000 performances! When I think about it, that is simply staggering."

He goes on to discuss the irony of his current situation: " [This is] written in great haste (and on my knees, above the market)...from my little store atelier where there is no space for me and I am crowded by, or should I say, drowned in merchandise. I, at 67, a merchant! I who was always an artist first and who always detested business? What is there to do!? Life has reversals like this, and the war has made me lose the result of 47 years of work [One must] resign oneself, and that is what I have done. That doesn't mean that I do not miss the good old days and I am never as happy as when I am together with colleagues, comedians, cinematographers, or magicians, when I am in my own element."

In another letter, Méliès refers to plans to produce an edition of his memoirs, which, though never published during his lifetime, is the probable foundation for the 1945 publication of Méliès' memoirs edited by Maurice Bessy. The letter goes on in great detail about all aspects of production, including how the linotype should be set up for the book, the importance of illustrations, etc.

The last letter, from 1932, is an enthusiastic review of Robert Evans' A Master of Modern Magic, a biography of Eugene Robert-Houdin (NY: Macoy 1932). The book is "very well written and as exact as possible concerning the dates," and that it "contains very few mistakes. It is certainly more near the truth than the book written against Robert-Houdin by Houdini, who seems to have been jealous of the posthumous reputation of our old master...[Evans] has evidently written this book in order to break this reputation."

Méliès  then expounds on the nature of his original trade, and the philosophy behind the illusion at the heart of cinema: "The conjurors (don't they?) work for the public, not for the professionals; if they have a success and seem extraordinary men to spectators, what do they require more? Nobody of us is really a 'sorcerer,' it is sufficient to look to be, and principally to know how to put our tricks, clever or not, in the maximum of value."

I had a chance to examine this precious archive at the recent 45th California International Antiquarian Book Fair.  It was no illusion. But it was definitely magic. Méliès was indeed the sorcerer of the Silent film era.

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks. The Méliès biography, at top, is being offered separately from the archive of letters.

Stills from the colored version of A Trip To The Moon courtesy of Harvey Deneroff, with our thanks.

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Woody Allen Books and the High Cost of Irony

by Stephen J. Gertz

If you collect the works of Woody Allen and wish to possess Four Films of Woody Allen (New York: Random House, 1982) a near fine, super-association/presentation copy inscribed to his  now ex-wife, Mia Farrow, must surely be the sweetest, most desirable to own. Its ironic inscription is priceless.

But rare book dealers are not altruists.

Originally sold by Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, June 27, 2010, this copy is now being offered for $7,500 by Biblioctopus.

Only one other signed copy is currently on the market. It, too, is in near fine condition. It is being offered by James Pepper Rare Books for $1,500.

Premium for deeply ironic inscription: $6,000. And worth every penny. Events subsequent to the inscription provide a subtext to it that's a book in itself and could not be more rich, ripe, and, ultimately, poignant. In the absence of an Allen first edition annotated by him this has to be the collectible Woody Allen book.

Image from Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

It is not necessary to rehash the Allen-Farrow scandal here. Suffice it to say, at some point post-mishegas, Ms. Farrow bid goodbye, good riddance, and vamoose to her  collection of Woody Allen books. They must have seemed like scalpels on the shelf, this particular book with its inscription a stiletto twisting into her gut as the coup de grâce.
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Images courtesy of Biblioctopus, with our thanks.
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David Mamet's Homage To A Lost Masterpiece Of Pornography

Recently discovered in the woodworking shop of a Beverly Hills dentist, the 30's porn classic, June Crenshaw, Sex Kitten of the Supreme Court, has been resurrected and restored by David Mamet with the assistance of actors Kristen Bell, Ricky Jay, and Ed O'Neill.

The saga of this forgotten gem, its palpable effect upon Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and the brouhaha when Justice Louis Brandeis tried to take it away from him for his own selfish purposes, remains to be told but until that time we thank Mamet for recovering this lost masterpiece of cinematic art from the woodchipper, a film based upon one of the most notorious works of literary erotica apocrypha, a rumor of a book never written and rarely read.

David Mamet's "Lost Masterpieces of Pornography" w/ Kristen Bell, Ed O'Neill & Ricky Jay from David Mamet

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With thanks to Funny Or Die.
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