Paper Profits. A Novel of Wall Street

New York: Horace Liveright, 1930. First edition. 347 pp. 8vo. Original black cloth, pictorial dust jacket designed by Hynd. Very good with rubbing to spine titles, stain to top edge, a few chips to jacket with partial loss to publisher's imprint but a nicer than usual example of a fragile jacket. First edition. 347 pp. 8vo. Inscribed on the ffep "To Edwin Lefevre with the sincere regards of Arthur Train March 24 1930." A better association copy of this title is hard to imagine. Lefévre was the preiminant documentarian of Wall Street and its personalities in the thirty years leading up to the crash of 1929. His Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), a fictionalized account of the life of stockbroker Larry Livermore, is perhaps the most famous Wall Street novel ever written; his other works included Wall Street Stories (1901) and The Making of a Stockbroker (1925). Arthur Train began his career as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan before becoming a best-selling author of court-room thrillers. In Paper Profits he turned his attention to Wall Street and the crash the year after it happened.