Four Sons; photoplay title of Mother Bernle Learns Her Letters, and Other Stories [Photoplay Edition]

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. [1928]. First Edition. Hardcover. [a nice-looking copy with just light shelfwear, front hinge a little weak (but not cracked), faint dust-soiling to top edge; the jacket is mildly edgeworn, with a few tiny nicks at the spine ends and single (internal) tape-reinforcement across the top of the spine]. (8 B&W film stills) Photoplay Edition, issued to coincide with the release of the 1928 Fox Film Corporation silent film directed by John Ford, a sentimental tale about a Bavarian widow and the fates of her sons -- three of whom end up fighting in the German army during World War I, while the fourth, having emigrated to New York, has become so thoroughly Americanized that he enlists in the American army, which causes his mother to be shunned in her native village. (The film was remade under the same title in 1940, keyed around the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.) The title story on which the movie was based, "Mother Bernle Learns Her Letters," is just 61 pages long, with the remainder of the volume taken up by seven additional stories, at least one of which, "Pas de Quatre," was adapted for an episode of the 1950s TV anthology series "Rheingold Theatre," under the title "Beloved Stranger." (John Ford filmed one additional Wylie story, "Pilgrimage," in 1933.) This is, by the way, technically a true first edition, as this exact collection of Wylie's stories had not been previously published: all seven of the additional stories had appeared in the 1926 collection "The Mad Busman, and Other Stories," but for this volume the "Busman" story was swapped out for the "Mother Bernle" yarn (which had first been published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1926, under the title "Grandmother Bernle Learns Her Letters"). .