Prematurely Gay

New York: William Morrow & Company. Very Good+ in Fair dj. 1948. First Edition. Hardcover. [only lightly shelfworn, lower rear corner very slightly bumped, a couple of tiny tears in cloth at top of spine, front hinge feels a little weak (not cracked); jacket has suffered about an inch-plus of paper loss at both ends of spine, with small but numerous chips at corners and edges]. (Don't get excited, it's not what you think -- "gay" in mainstream parlance didn't always mean what it means today.) This is a madcap comic novel (something of a specialty for this author), featuring "a teetotaling tycoon, his beautiful heiress-apparent and a young man of ideas -- Prince Consort ideas, as it turns out" -- all to do with a PR agency's attempts to shore up the sagging fortunes of its client's hair-preparation product, "Heigh-ho Silver." Jack Iams, who in addition to his novelistic endeavors was a journalist, editor and TV critic, may not have risen to the level of a Preston Sturges, but his fiction seems animated by the same spirit of knockabout farce, and he had a similar fondness for wacky character names -- here including Commodore Inch, Drummond Gridley, and Dafne La Flamme. A scarce Iams title. .