Flying a Red Kite [SIGNED]

Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1962. Hardcover. Good/good. Hardcover. Signed and inscribed to previous owner by author in ink to front free endpaper. 8 1/2" X 5 3/4". 239pp. Wear to unclipped dust jacket with rubbing, creasing, chipping, and toning to covers, corners, and edges. Several open tears at corners and spine of jacket. Light sunning to spine. Bound in tan cloth over boards with spine lettered in red. Toning to spine and edges of boards. Gentle bumps to corners and to head and tail of spine. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is sound. An overall solid copy of Canadian author Hugh Hood's (1928-2000) first book, signed by Hood.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:
It all started towards the end of the 1930s when the young Hugh Hood serviced a flourishing Saturday Evening Post route with more than fifty weekly customers. That was where the author-to-be first encountered the short story, in the formula fiction of the famous magazine writers, Damon Runyon, Guy Gilpatric, Arthur Train, and of course the Master, P.G. Wodehouse. By the '40s, Hood had discovered Pocketbooks, and, in particular, My Life and Hard Times (included in The Thurber Carnival) which led first to a story called `Recollections of the Works Department' and later to some of the methods employed in his opus, The New Age / Le nouveau siècle.

For a writer who once professed `If in the course of my life I can get a half a dozen stories printed, I'll be satisfied', Flying a Red Kite marked a different kind of beginning. The first selection of ten stories was completed in March of 1962 by John Colombo and Robert Weaver for publication by the Ryerson Press. Both editors felt at the time that an additional story was required to round out the sequence to a cohesive volume. Hood wrote `The End of It', and that is how we have it here -- the eleven stories of Hood's first book-length publication.(Publisher).