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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Beresford Egan's Illustrated Fleurs du Mal in (Yet Another) Binding to Behold

by Stephen J. Gertz

Binding by Robert Porter, 1990.

"He is a lad after your own heart...an elegant, elongated young man, with a penchant for gold-tipped cigarettes and gaudy neckwear. He changes his raiment four times a day and never sits down more than he can help for fear of de-creasing his trousers. He wears two rings on his right hand and carries a Malacca cane. When he walks he reminds me of Rasputin (my borzoi, not the Mad Monk), and when he talks, which is often and at great length, he puts one in mind of Oscar Wilde."

Color Frontispiece

In the description above, proffered by a character in his semi-autobiographical novel, Pollen (1933), Egan is describing himself c. 1925. He was, as he admitted, "overdressed, ambitious, and dissatisfied." He was oppressed by the local obsession with money-making, and had an eye and ear for satire, i.e. he illustrated The Sink of Solitude (Hermes Press, 1928), a parody of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness).

 

“Born in England [in 1906?], Egan was educated in South Africa. After working as a bank clerk, he became sports cartoonist on the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg. By the time he returned to England in 1926, his satirical bent was well established. In London, he first became known as a draughtsman and also made his name as a writer" (Alan Horne, The Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators, pp. 175-176).

"1928 was Beresford Egan's first fruitful year in London...In that year he illustrated in black and white Les Fleurs du Mal, [Loüys'] Aphrodite, Cyprian Masques, and an edition of De Sade [each released in 1929]" (Allen, Paul. Beresford Egan: An Introduction to His Work, p. 14).

He had a constitutional aversion to censorship. "Mr. Egan's pictures have noticeably a literary quality. Tte drawings...might be described as satiric essays in Love and Virtue. They are vigorous and necessary indictments of the pruderies of the formative years of this century, and as searchingly moral as the writings of Mr. Havelock Ellis wee concerning the pruderies of the latter years of the nineteenth century" (poet and novelist Seton Peacy, The Preface, May, 1932).

Egan was quick to point out that his drawings were not meant to stimulate revolting attitudes but, rather, to engender a revulsion against them. "You think some of my drawings inspire lust? No, no, no. They show people the sort of things they get up to without seeing themselves from a place of detachment. I want to show them the ugliness of what they are doing and so cruch their foolish idealising. I show the real visual and moral ugliness of the prostitute and the hypocrite...

"...Can you really believe that I am the sort of man to draw prostitutes for the pleasure of it?...If all the amusements of Soho depended upon me they would have to close down. I can easily create something beautiful for you to hang in your room, but my satirical drawings are meant to be grotesque. It is right that you should be horrified. That is the correct attitude to my art...What I do is in revulsion - to shock by the power of my satire!" He was chronically irritated by the sins of society.

Egan "used many media including oil, watercolour, chalk, scraperboard, gouache and pencil, but mostly used a brush or pen. As his skill increased, he used solid blacks instead of cross-hatching—he wrote in Epitaph (1943) that he used ‘Black and white with no linear half-tones to confuse the issue, no photographic realism to frustrate the design.’ Egan’s work has often been compared to that of Aubrey Beardsley, but in Egan’s case, the feeling of decadence is a reflection of his disgust—he wrote that ‘What I do is in revulsion—to shock by the power of satire!’” (Horne, op cit.).

He did not appreciate the comparison to Beardsley.

"In drawing, his mastery of the single line was compared to that of Beardsley, but Egan... always wanted to repudiate that particular influence.The quality of a line is determined by the instrument employed and, while Beardsley used a pen, Egan's work was for many years executed with a No. 3 sable hair brush. 'The trained eye should see this,' he wrote indignantly in [another of his semi-autobiographical novels] Epitaph [1943], but trained eyes are rare and critics unnumerable.'" (Allen, p. 12).

"Beardsley's predominant object is one of decorative and exquisitely detailed pattern in general effect. To this his interest in anatomy and facial expression is subordinated; whereas these latter constitute the main interest of Mr. Egan's drawings, which, almost devoid of alien decoration, arrest entirely by their means" (C. Bower Alcock, Egan's collaborator on Fleurs du Mal, writing in Arts & Crafts, 1928).

"The fellow has a line. Intellectually, his weakness is that he does try so hard to shock us; and it is then, and then only, that he makes us cry: the Beardsley touch! For Egan is original enough in all conscience" (G.K.'s Weekly, October 27, 1928).

A Beardsley - Egan comparison that discusses only technique and style neglects the obvious fact that these two artists swam deeply with the Decadents, producing some of the most dramatic examples of decadent imagery yet to be created and, in their deceptively simple drama and self-conscious delight, unlikely to be surpassed.

Regarding the custom binding for this copy of Fleurs du Mal,  master binder Robert Porter writes, in a signed autograph note dated February 1990 that accompanied it: 

“Les Fleurs du Mal. The binding is dark green morocco with onlays of red, yellow, blue, mauve, purple, orange, green, grey & black, gold & blind tooling. The onlaid petals have two shapes, which are reversible, & two sizes, to make both flowers & leaves. The theme is simple: the bright colours on the upper cover symbolize the delights & pleasures; the lower cover with its sombre effects symbolizes the ‘du mal’ element. The flowers themselves are, of course, symbolic, not real. The colours are deliberately gaudy although, one hopes , attractive, & similar to the colours of the frontispiece. The image I have in mind is of medieval enamel. Gold emphasises their brightness. The lower cover shows the same shapes & patterns dead & withered. The colours are black & grey with missing shapes outlined in blind. The spine shows the constituent parts & acts as a form of transition between the two parts.” Signed on the verso: “The book. R.L. Porter. Bookbinder.”

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[EGAN, Beresford, illustrator]. BAUDELAIRE, [Charles]. Fleurs du Mal in Pattern and Prose by Beresford Egan and C. Bower Alcock. London: The Sophistocles Press and T. Werner Laurie Ltd., [1929].

Limited to 500 numbered copies (this copy being No. 83), signed by the illustrator, Beresford Egan. Large quarto (11 1/2 x 9 3/16 inches; 292 x 233 mm.). At foot of title: “For private circulation and sold only to subscribers.” 142, [1, printer’s imprint], [1, blank] pp. Inserted color frontispiece (“Imaginary Portrait of Baudelaire”), with captioned tissue guard, title vignette and vignette on p. [135] in black and green, and fifteen full-page line drawings in black and white by Beresford Egan. Decorative woodcut initials and tail-pieces.

Bound by Robert Porter in full dark green morocco. Front cover with a stylized floral and leaf design in onlaid red, purple, maroon, turquoise, tan, yellow, orange, blue, and green morocco gilt. Back cover tooled in blind in the same design with black and gray morocco onlays. Smooth spine lettered in blind and decoratively tooled with gilt dots and with maroon, tan, red, brown, yellow, gray, and black morocco floral onlays. Top edge trimmed, others uncut. Marbled endpapers.

Allen B.3(a).

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, from a copy I handled five years ago, with my thanks.
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New Trend For Signing Books: Autograph In Blood!

Sachin Tendulkar.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith.

Red Smith (1905-1982), the great American sportswriter, would probably shake his head in wonder, then return to default position - “The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek” - with news of a new book signed by the author with his own blood. Traditionally, bloodletting  occurs while writing, not afterward.

Sachin Tendulkar, the ace cricketeer for Team India who is considered to be the greatest batsman in the history of the sport, has written his autobiography. Tendulkar Opus will be issued in a limited edition of ten copies signed by Tendulkar on the limitation page in his blood. Publication is scheduled for February 2011.

Each copy of the sang edition measures ten square feet, weighs 87 lbs., 9 oz., and is 852 pages long. That's not a book, that's a slab. They should break a champagne bottle over the first copy at the launch party.

Each copy will cost 75 - yes, 75 - THOUSAND dollars. The proceeds will go to charity. A trade edition of 1,000 copies sans sang will be available for between $2,000 - $3,000 each. Shipping and handling probably extra. A lot, I'm guessing.

In addition to his blood, Tendulkar is providing a sample of his saliva to be used to create his DNA profile which will then be printed on a 6' 6" gatefold in the book. I believe that falls into "value-added" territory, though what value remains unclear. I guess it'll make the book that much easier to reprint, each copy an exact duplicate to a degree never before possible and usher in an era of Clone Lit. Then again, it  may just be the most detailed author's bio ever to be found in a book, making this the ultimate autobiography.

But really, what, no sweat? No tears? For $75,000 you can keep the saliva, I want the complete holy trinity of body fluids.

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I'm pleased to have this opportunity to draw attention to Red Smith. Both he and S.J. Perelman  have become somewhat forgotten and deserve all the attention they can get from readers today. Red Smith and S.J. Perelman are at the top of writer's writers lists; They were consummate craftsmen. I have learned so much from reading them. And have had so much fun. I once owned every single first edition of Perelman's books, each a collection of his short pieces for The New Yorker, etc., and each a treasure. Those unfamiliar with Red Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his writing, should pick up a copy of The Red Smith Reader (New York: Randon House, 1982) NOW.

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