The Best of Rob Wagner's Script

Metuchen NJ/London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.. Fine. 1985. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, as issued) [nice clean as-new book, with no discernible wear]. (B&W photo frontispiece) An anthology of short but very interesting pieces from Rob Wagner's Script, "a remarkable, though certainly small, journal with a fiercely loyal readership, published in Beverly Hills [California], and intended, basically, for the more intelligent citizens of that community." Published from 1929 through 1949 (although founding editor Wagner himself died in 1942), it's sometimes thought of as a kind of West Coast equivalent of The New Yorker, although it never quite reached that level of sustained quality (and as editor Slide notes, its cartoons were never as funny as TNY's). It definitely had an impressive roster of contributors, though, as this collection demonstrates, including: Ernst Lubitsch, Agnes de Mille, Tom Mix, Upton Sinclair, Jim Tully (profiles of Wilson Mizner and Frank Capra), William Saroyan (six pieces reprinted here), Charlie Chaplin (who contributed poetry, short stories, and even political pieces), Jessamyn West, Dore Schary, Ray Bradbury (two stories, "To Make a Long Story Much Shorter" and "Skeleton"), Ben Hecht, Don Herold, James Wong Howe, Eddie Cantor, Dalton Trumbo, and Lillian Gish. .