Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell, 1936

Margaret Mitchell. GONE WITH THE WIND. Macmillan, NY 1936.

Current Selling Prices
$5000-$8000 / £2500-£4500

CLASSIC LITERATURE
Classic Southern Civil War novel well filmed with the fabled Gable and our own svelte Vivien Leigh. Oscars all round. This is what the correct first looks like (from a dealer's catalog) " Black cloth-backed gray patterned boards, spine lettered in gilt, with the red endpapers, and red topstain (ie to the top fore edge of the book) in first issue jacket, without the phrase, "Complete Unexpurgated Edition" printed, which is found on the front panel of later issues, and with the original price of $3.00 intact, listed in the bottom corner of the inside front flap . First Printing of the First Edition, First State/First issue with "Published May 1936" on copyright page, and in the First Issue dust jacket with rear panel headed "Macmillan Spring Novels" listing GWTW as the second title in the second column.' The novel above it should be Charles Morgan's forgotten and unsaleable novel 'Sparkenboke.' 10,000 were printed. The jacket can, of course, be price clipped -- but that means an expensive slice in the price. This emphasis on first/ first / first comes from the phenomenon (esp on ebay) of persons trying to sell reprints as first editions ('First edition, 17th printing' etc.,) When someone has the real thing they have to make it unequivocal-- even then they will get inquiries asking if it is really a first, or more annoyingly having described a really nice copy a buffer emails to ask if it's ex library. Infinite patience required.

VALUE? Amazing copies of this book have shown up, esp related to the movie--signed by the cast, with drawings by the designer, loosely inserted letters from Gable or David O. Selznick etc.,. A copy turned up in 1994 signed by 75 members of the cast and crew with 26 related photos- making close to $60,000 at Christies East. MM signed quite alot and her signature can add a grand or two. Hard to get a nice unsigned one in decent d/w for less than $5000 - except possibly in a poorly attended auction or a bookshop unused to highspots. In the 1970s decent copies were going for as little as $80. In 2005 a decent signed one in a fancy leather box topped $12000, another made $9000. Unsigned it doesn't appear to have gone much over $5k although a copy described as 'pristine' made $4500 as far back 1990. 'Pristine' is a word you don't use lightly.

Updating this entry from Feb 2007, a decentish jacketed copy with a letter from Clark Gable discussing his playing of Rhett Butler and his talk with Margaret Mitchell sits on ABE at $80K, probably valuing the letter at $70K, a price that must be taken with a pinch of salt. Decent copies seem to be $7500 or more, there are a lot of signed copies around often of reprints or in later states.

TRIVIA. The title comes from the poem 'Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae' by decadent poet Ernest Dowson. Dowson, a superb poet, is the ultimate doomed writer--decadent, drunken, and deperately in love with unattainable girls etc. The third stanza of the poem (usually known just as Cynara) reads:-

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

In MM's words, it was the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" for the title and she found it with the pale Dowson. Other books, songs and movies come from Dowson's verse. The last line above was the inspiration for the song title 'Always True to You in My Fashion' from 'Kiss Me, Kate' by Cole Porter. The phrase 'days of wine and roses' comes from his poem 'Vitae Summa Brevis':-

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream. /

This inspired a movie, a soap opera and three smoochy songs ((Henry Mancini, Andy Williams, Dream Syndicate.) Fittingly the movie is about alcoholism. Potentially some of Dowson's own books are worth more that 'Gone With the Wind.' His 'Verses' (1896, one of thirty on vellum) made over $10000 25 years ago when Ms M's books was selling regularly for $100. Sic transit...

Israel Rank / Kind Hearts and Coronets

Roy Horniman. ISRAEL RANK. The Autobiography of a Criminal. Chatto & Windus, London 1907.

Current Selling Prices
$450-$900? /£220-£450?

FIRST EDITION / CRIME FICTION / CLASSIC MOVIES
The novel that was the basis for the British movie masterpiece 'Kind Hearts and Coronets.' Uncommon but not impossible. I have never found a copy. Legendary book scout Martin Stone has seen it twice. Even an Eyre & Spottiswoode re-issue in 1947 (Century Library) with an intro by the redoubtable Hugh Kingsmill is unfindable. No copies of either on the infobahn, which in 2007 means rare (or highly desirable i.e. copies turn up but they always get bought in a day or 2 and no one has yet come up with a stroppy enough price to give the punters pause.)

The film is the greatest work by Ealing Studios and appears on the Time magazine top 100 list as well as on the BFI Top 100 British films list. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted Kind Hearts and Coronets the 25th greatest comedy film of all time. In 2004 the same magazine named it the 7th greatest British film of all time. Directed by Robert Hamer, something of a poet, latterly a dipsomaniac but one of the British cinema's greatest directors. One of his poems can be found at our shop website. He was published in 'New Verse' and also while at Cambridge in 'Contemporaries And Their Maker' (along with the spy Donald MacLean).

The astute critic Philip Kemp wrote of Horniman's book:-

"It’s sometimes suggested that Israel Rank is a feeble book, and anti-Semitic. Neither is true. Horniman’s novel is light, witty, and entertaining, written in an aphoristic sub-Wildean style. (In his introduction to the 1946 edition, Hugh Kingsmill hints that Horniman was gay.) Above all—and this is undoubtedly what appealed to Hamer—it expresses an amused disdain for conventional morality. Here’s Israel Rank, the first-person narrator, musing on the ethics of killing: “There is an old saying, ‘Murder will out.’ I am really unable to see why this should be so. I am convinced that many a delightful member of society has found it necessary at some time or other to remove a human obstacle, and has done so undetected and undisturbed by those pangs of conscience which Society, afraid of itself, would have us believe wait upon the sinner.”

As for anti-Semitism: Horniman’s hero is half-Jewish, his Jewish father having married a daughter of the aristocratic Gascoyne clan. Horniman, himself of mixed ethnicity—according to Kingsmill, his father was paymaster in chief of the Royal Navy and his mother “a member of the Greek aristocracy”—uses his hero’s ancestry to poke quiet fun at the casual bigotry of Edwardian England.... Four years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, however, a comedy about a Jewish serial killer would scarcely have been acceptable—least of all at Balcon’s studio. Israel’s surname had to go, too: Ealing’s films, after all, were distributed by the Rank Organization, chairman, J. Arthur Rank. So Israel Rank became the half-Italian Louis Mazzini.

Kind Hearts and Coronets retains the essential plot of Israel Rank and most of its characters....the plotting is far more varied and inventive: Israel dispatches most of his victims with poison—not the most ingenious, or cinematic, of methods—where Louis uses explosive caviar, arrow, weir, shotgun, and so forth. Israel is arrested for the bungled murder of his final victim, Earl Gascoyne, whereas Hamer and his co -screenwriter, John Dighton, introduce the delicious irony of having Louis convicted for the one murder he didn’t commit."

Alec Guinness said that he was originally offered the parts of only four D'Ascoynes. "I read [the screenplay] on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script," he recounts. "I went straight back to the hotel and sent a telegram saying, 'Why four parts? Why not eight!?

Roy Horniman's papers are at the University of Reading in 27 boxes, waiting for a biographer to step forward. He was for some time the owner of 'The Ladies' Review', a keen anti vivisectionist and a member of the British Committee of The Indian National Congress. His dates are 1874 to 1930. He acted in many London theatres but his main talents lay in management and authorship. For a time he was tenant and manager of the Criterion Theatre and he wrote many original plays and adaptations of his own and others' novels. In later life he wrote and adapted for the screen. Hamer must have found his book somewhere because he is credited with seeing its movie potential. Hamer's own copy (marked up) would be a nice find. Horniman wrote several other books, two of which are in Bleiler including the occult novel 'The Sin of Atlantis' (1900) and 'Lord Cammarleigh's Secret: A Fairy Story of To-Day' (1907) Both are £100 books in excellent condition, a lot less in ordinary condition. 'Lord Cammarleigh's Secret' is less easy to find and according to EFB deals with reincarnation, magic and witchcraft. All his books are unknown to Locke which could mean they are fairly light in the fantasy department.

Robert Hamer also directed the amazing Kent based noir ' 'The Long Memory' (from the Howard Clewes novel) and 'Father Brown,' he was described by one earnest film guide as 'the greatest miscarriage of talent in the British Cinema.' He had, as they say, a problem with alcohol.

VALUE? Search me. It has to be £300+, not a thousand pound book however. A jacket would take it there but would be a minor miracle. It is (according to uber runner Martin Stone) in a pale pinkish cloth that is vulnerable to soiling and browning, so nice copies are very difficult. Somebody wants £200 for another Horniman title but on examination he is a relister who would put $100 on a Joan Fonda workout book. I would buy a copy in the low hundreds in nice condition in a provincial bookshop but would probably not leave punching the air. Trivia. Look out for the young Arthur Lowe (cult hero Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army) as a tabloid reporter in the last 2 minutes of the film.

Express to Hollywood. Victor McLaglen. 1934.

Sorry have been off the air for 3 days while I completed the complicated process of turning this blog into a website. Please note it's now called www.bookride.com. The name has no real meaning, it was just available at the time, but it seems curiously suitable with its suggestions of horseracing, being taken for a ride, bookies, punters, touts and a merry adventure. Buying books is a bit of a punt and I am here to point out the favourites and the starting prices, the winners, the losers and the outsiders. Can't stretch the metaphor much further...today's hot tip is howling rare - Jarrolds was an interesting publisher.

Victor McLaglen. EXPRESS TO HOLLYWOOD. Jarrolds, London, 1934.

Current Selling Prices
$600-$800? /£300-£400? Want level 25-50 Highish

MOVIES / BOXING / AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Autobiography by Hollywood hard man and ex boxer recalling his wildly adventurous career prior to entering the movies. McLaglen was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. His father, a bishop, moved the family to South Africa when McLaglen was a child. He left home at fourteen to join the army with the intention of fighting in the Second Boer War. However much to his chagrin, he was stationed at Windsor Castle and was later forced to leave the army when his true age was discovered. From 1904 - 1920 he was a boxer and in 1918 McLaglen won the Heavyweight Championship of the British Army. The Wikiman says of this unfindable book "His tale of the road, his odyssey from his native England through Canada and the western United States, details his long-held desire to be a professional prizefighter, climaxing in a no-decision fight with world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. McLaglen supplements his story with vignettes of life as a farmer, gold and silver prospector, wrestler, policeman, soldier, vaudeville performer, miner, pearl fisher, big-game hunter, and sign-painter. In all likelihood the only Academy Award-winning actor ever, past or future, also to be Assistant Provost Marshal of the city of Baghdad, McLaglen writes a story that reads as though Jack London had written it. He writes with candor and humility, and with style. It is am immensely enjoyable book, and the fact that McLaglen was at the time of its writing only beginning to achieve the fame and popularity that would maintain his career nearly another three decades is both astonishing and a bit disappointing: it would have been wonderful to read his accounts of the next quarter century...." Of course he went on to make "The Informer," "The Quiet Man," and "What Price Glory?". Book is wanted by movie buffs and boxing collectors. I have trod on his name on Hollywood Boulevard where, as Ray Davies has it, his name "is written in concrete."

VALUE? 18 years ago someone paid $120 for a signed photo at Darvick , there is a BIN for an insubstantial clipped note at ebay $250. He wasn't John Wain, who can go very high indeed, but for some reason hard guy's signatures are often pricy.
No record of the book anywhere. Unknown to science. Jarrolds books tended to have funky colourful jackets so it would look good and could be worth a few hundred of your British pounds. Sans jacket still very good, people want to read it.