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ADE, GEORGE Hand-Made FablesGarden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920. First Edition. Hardcover. Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon. (no dust jacket) [nice clean book, minimal wear, slight browning to page edges, hinges swing a little loosely but are not cracked or damaged in any visible way]. "Studies in American vernacular" by this noted humorist of the day, reprinted from Cosmopolitan magazine -- long before it was all about the sex (or about the sex at all). The author also contributes a brief "Explanatory," in which he, well, explains how he is "pleased to put a preface to this book, for the reason that he will be permitted to refrain from using 'Foreword.' A great many people who abhor slang pay to have their own books published so that they may indulge in 'Foreword' -- which is hereby designated as the musk perfumery of literature." The thirty Fables have titles like "The Kittenish Superanns and the World-Weary Snipes" and "The Twelve-Cylinder Speed of the Leisure Class." Most amusin', as are the many illustrations. Ade has been called "our first modern American humorist, [whose] distinctive use of the American language followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain. In his unique "Fables in Slang," [his] regular practice ... is to present a little drama incorporating concrete, specific evidence with which he implicitly indicts the object of his satire -- always a type (e.g, the social climber)... In the values implicit in the fables, Ade manifests an ambivalence between the traditional rural virtues in which he was raised (the virtues of Horatio Alger and the McGuffey Readers) and the craftiness he saw all around him in Chicago, where the population was exploding." [Quoted from the excellent Wikipedia entry on Ade.]. Very Good+ .
Offered for US$ 20.00 by: ReadInk - Book number: 13521
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