The Pacer

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company. Very Good. (c.1927). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [solid clean copy, light bumping at several corners, very slight fraying to cloth at lower extremities, small bookseller's rubber stamp (Bertrand Smith, Long Beach, California) on front pastedown]. First novel by an author who had an intermittent output over the course of the quarter-century or so. (I find four novels for her in OCLC, the last in 1952; she also seems to have been involved in social work in some fashion, and her name appears on several additional books in that field; she also contributed several magazine pieces on the topic of immigration to Harper's Magazine in the early 1920s.) This one's a romantic-triangle potboiler, about a girl who has to go to work (as a "pacer" in a pickle factory) at age 16 after her aunt the dressmaker becomes ill and can no longer work; she ends up in an unhappy marriage to the pickle factory owner, then subsequently falls in love with a poet. From the original New York Times review: "In short, the book belongs to the vast majority of the mediocre, the novels 'too bad for a blessing, too good for a curse.'" Ouch. Maybe that's why she didn't give up her day job. .