When a Man Marries

Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. (c.1909). Early printing. Hardcover. [a lovely copy, minor wear to cloth at spine extremities, light dust-soiling to top edge; jacket is bright and attractive, with a little wear at corners, small tears at a couple of corners, tiny chip at bottom rear corner of spine]. (color frontis. + 2 color plates; line drawings) Rinehart had already made her name with her first two novels, "The Circular Staircase" (1908) and "The Man in Lower Ten" (1909) -- both mysteries -- when her hit Broadway farce "Seven Days" (co-written with Avery Hopwood) opened in November 1909. This novel appeared in bookstores mere weeks later, with ads touting it as the basis for the play (and rather blatantly trying to pass off excerpts from glowing reviews of the play as being in reference to the novel); I mention this only because the symbiotic connection between the two seems to have been pretty much lost to history, or at least to bibliographic history as practiced by various chroniclers of Mrs. Rinehart's work (who basically only care about her mystery fiction). The ads also tout it as "a Clever, Sprightly, Deliciously Humorous Mystery Novel," when in fact it is pretty much just a straight farce about a young woman who agrees to pose as the wife of a friend, who is unable to reveal the fact of his recent divorce for fear of offending his moneyed relatives and thus imperiling his inheritance. (Yeah, I know.) The novel is more interesting from a narrative standpoint, told as it is in the first person by the woman who's asked to be the pretend wife -- a spirited and rather no-nonsense type, given to observations like "I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary." The text is enlivened with three beautiful full-color plates by Harrison Fisher, one of the top illustrators of his day, and nearly fifty line drawings by Mayo Bunker (billed as "H.M. Bunker" on the title page). Not an especially rare book, but the jacket is uncommon, and it's a beauty. NOTE that most sources (including the Library of Congress) specify that the first edition had four color plates, while this copy has only three (including the frontispiece, for which the LC detailed record does NOT account). ALSO NOTE that other versions of the original Bobbs-Merrill jacket bear the legend "By the author of THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE and THE MAN IN LOWER TEN" at the top of the front panel, the present book has only "By the author of THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE"; possibly an earlier variant? (Both books, as noted, are blurbed on the rear jacket panel.) And FINALLY NOTE that the flaps of this jacket are plain gold, bearing no text, which may or may not be bibliographically significant. Enough NOTES, already! .