Two Saps, and Fourteen other Stories

Los Angeles: DeVorss & Co.. Very Good in Poor dj. (c.1942). 1st Edition? [see notes]. Hardcover. [moderate bumping to all corners, some spotting/soiling to top edge of text block, a little wear at top of spine; jacket is age-tanned and heavily chipped at various edges and corners]. Fifteen "humorous stories" by an author who, it's claimed in the introduction, "is trying the experiment of inflicting these...on the public." Both this introduction and the jacket blurb inform us that the author's writing activities had been for his own pleasure rather than for the "general literary market" (which might imply that he'd accumulated a drawerful of rejection slips), and yet the jacket blurb also stated that his tales "have been joyfully received by readers" [what readers?], and that "during the last war [?] hundreds of these volumes [what volumes?!] were donated to service men by the author in the hope that their cheerful and humorous tone would make time served in the fox-holes more bearable." All this, I have to say, only makes sense if this is a later (i.e. post-World War II printing, or perhaps just a later-issue jacket), as the vernacular and settings of these stories is clearly contemporary to the early 1940s rather than the mid-1910s, which means the "last war" referred to can only be World War II. At any rate, the stories -- all of which relate the on-the-road adventures of the narrator and his pal Bill, traveling farm machinery salesmen representing the "Empire Company" of Chicago -- are amusing enough (or "enuf," to adopt one of the author's spelling idiosyncrasies). Their travels take them to pretty much all parts of the western U.S., although the author is less concerned with local color than with the various characters they encounter along the way. Another reason I think this might be a later-issue jacket is that the rear panel carries laudatory blurbs from five anonymous individuals -- a sea captain, a young woman, a service man, a review editor, and a college professor -- three of which refer specifically to the book "Two Saps" itself. The author, again per the jacket blurb, had been "an attorney, a newspaper man, and an educator" -- but we'll have to take this on faith, as I've had no luck turning up any authorial trace of this guy, apart from this one book. .