On Guard!

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1961. First Edition. Hardcover. [a nice clean book, moderately worn at extremities, very slight fraying/cracking at upper corners; jacket has one tiny chip and some minor wrinkling along the top edge of the front panel, a bit of fading to the spine, and an itsy-bitsy chip at the base of the spine]. Juvenile novel about a high school senior whose only hope for a college scholarship depends (for some reason) on his being able to organize a fencing team. This was the author's first book, and her jacket bio presents her bona fides in the sport: "I learned my fencing in Chicago at the school of Alvar Hermanson, and cherish medals in Women's Foils for the State of Illinois two years in succession." (She also had a foot in the music world, it seems: her husband was Kurt Adler, then-General Director of the San Francisco Opera, and seventeen years after this book was published she wrote one more, also for juvenile readers, called "The Violin Case Case.") This book was the winner of the Boys' Life--Dodd, Mead Writing Award, which seems to have been presented annually from about the early 1950s until the mid-1960s; other recipients included Mildred Wirt Benson and Jim Kjelgaard. I'm just gonna go out on a limb here, and note that the list of juvie novels centered around fencing is a pretty short one. .