In The Beginning

New York: John Day Company. Very Good-. 1928. 1st Trade Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. Signed, with an inscription, by author Jim Tully, to his mother. This is the first trade edition, and first American Edition which was published prior to the UK trade edition. The book is in Very Good- condition and lacks the accompanying dust jacket. The book has a toned parchment spine and lovely decorated paper covered boards with a Curwen Press pattern designed by Paul Nash. The spine ends of the book cover have several small edge nicks and tears along with a couple of small chips missing. The corners and edges have rubbing and bits of paper loss. The text pages are clean and bright. The endpapers have light, generalized toning. There rear pastedown has a prior bookseller's name plate (Hollywood Book Store, in Hollywood, CA) . "George Norman Douglas (8 December 1868 – 7 February 1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books such as his 1915 Old Calabria were also appreciated for the quality of their writing." Bleiler: pg63." As a free-lancer he (Tully) was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, rather tame by current standards, he became known as the most-hated man in Hollywood—a title he relished. Less lucrative but closer to his heart were the books he wrote about his life on the road and the American underclass. He also wrote an affectionate memoir of his childhood with his extended Irish family, as well as novels on prostitution, boxing, Hollywood, and a travel book. While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors, they also garnered both commercial success and critical acclaim from, among others, H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes, who wrote that Tully "has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries." Beggars of Life, a silent film starring Louise Brooks based on Tully's memoir of the same name and its play adaptation, Outside Looking In, by Maxwell Anderson, was released in 1928. " (from Wikipedia); Signed by Notable Personage, Unrelated .