Watch Your Thirst; A Dry Opera in Three Acts

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923. Signed and numbered Limited Edition, Number 426 of 1000. Hardcover. Good/poor. George Howe. The format is approximately 8 inches by 11 inches. viii, [2] 175, [7] pages. Illustrations. DJ fragments are in a plastic sleeve. Large portion of DJ spine is gone. Other areas show wear, soiling , tears and chips. Some front board weakness restrengthened with glue. Front of DJ has the statement "You may lead a man to water but can you stop his drink?" This work was dedicated to The Tavern Club, Boston, sanctuary of youth and mirth. Preface by Samuel Johnson, written some 139 years after his death and dated April 1st, 1923 from Eternity Place. The Personages in the piece are in two groups, the Immortals and the Mortals. The Immortals include Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Bacchus, Venus, and Cupid. The Mortals include Ganymede, a bootlegger, Zoe Moo, his affinity for the moment, Choregos, Leader of the Chorus, and the Chorus. Time is all the time and the place is heaven and earth. Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 - July 21, 1938) was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Wister was a member of the Porcellian Club, through which he became lifelong friends with Theodore Roosevelt. As a senior Wister wrote the Hasty Pudding's then most successful show, Dido and Aeneas. Wister graduated from Harvard in 1882. On an 1893 visit to Yellowstone National Park, Wister met the western artist Frederic Remington, who remained a lifelong friend. George (Hauthaler) Howe (1896 - 1941) was active/lived in New York. George Howe is known as an Illustrator (wildlife, figures). A three-act operetta by American author Owen Wister (1860-1938) on the follies of prohibition. It had been performed at the Tavern Club in Boston, under the title Watch Your Thirst: A Dry Opera in Three Acts. It was completely rewritten to celebrate the end of prohibition in 1933 and performed again at the Tavern Club, and a second privately printed edition was also produced and signed by Wister. This title is of the original edition only. The Tavern Club was founded in 1884 by Royal Whitman, T. Adamowski, B.C. Porter, George Munzig, and Frederick Prince. Charter members included Arthur Rotch and others. Notable members of the club have included William Dean Howells, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry James, and Charles Eliot Norton. In February, 1885, the club adopted the Totem of Bear, which continues today as mascot for the group. Frequent dinners, lectures, and musical and theatrical performances take place in the club for the members and their guests. In March 1885, Mark Twain attended a dinner in his honor, and another in 1901. Dinners have been given in honor of many others, including Elihu Vedder (1887), Rudyard Kipling (1895), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1902), John Singer Sargent (1903), Booker T. Washington (1905), Winston Churchill (1907), Norman Angell (1913), George Macaulay Trevelyan (1924), Owen Wister (1929), Ignace Paderewski (1930). A pervasive sense of humor and occasion characterizes many club activities. In 1903, the club won the baseball Challenge Cup against rival St. Botolph Club. The 1907 Annual Meeting treated the Members to a Puppy Raffle. Also in 1907 Taverners in 16th century German costume participated in the Copley Society's artists festival, along with other local groups. Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The word is also used to refer to a period of time during which such bans are enforced. In the United States from 1920 to 1933, a nationwide constitutional law prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. The alcohol industry was curtailed by a succession of state legislatures, and finally ended nationwide under the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on January 16, 1919. Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933. Following the ban, criminal gangs gained control of the beer and liquor supply in many cities. By the late 1920s, a new opposition to Prohibition emerged nationwide. Critics attacked the policy as causing crime, lowering local revenues, and imposing "rural" Protestant religious values on "urban" America. The Twenty-first Amendment ended Prohibition, though it continued in some states.