The String of Pearls

Philadelphia/London: J.B. Lippincott Company. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1929. First American Edition. Hardcover. [lovely copy, tight and clean, with just minimal wear to book and jacket]. "An unusually charming romance set in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, the emerald foothills of the German mountains." There's a rather fulsome rear-jacket blurb about the author and her "hard road to success" -- orphaned as a child, had to sell her first novel secretly over the objections of her husband, became a best-selling author but lost her fortune when the German economy crashed in 1923, etc. But "fortunately, she still had her imagination, her publishers and her reading public," and six years later she had written her way back to financial independence -- thanks no doubt in large part to what sounds like a pretty extreme work ethic, involving fourteen hours a day at her typewriter AND five or six hours answering her correspondence from around the globe. She wrote well over one hundred books in the course of her career, but "The String of Pearls" (German title "Um Diamanten und Perlen," originally published in 1925) appears to have been the only one translated into English. However, she remains a prominent enough name in German literary history to have gotten her face on a postage stamp in 1992. She does not appear to have been related to Gustav Mahler, but I won't claim to have dug too deeply into the matter. .