Vitamins: What They Are and How They Can Benefit You [*SIGNED*]

New York: The Viking Press. Very Good-. 1940. First Edition. Hardcover. (with several torn pieces of the original dust jacket laid in) [a good sound copy, with only light wear to extremities and slight fading along the spine, BUT there is a good deal of pencil underlining throughout the text (see Notes)]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "To my good friend / Charly King / from / Henry Borsook." The author, a professor of biochemistry at Caltech from 1929 until 1968, did significant work in both protein synthesis and, as an extension, of the role of proteins (and vitamins) in human nutrition. The present volume has been described as "among the first to present contemporary nutritional ideas to the layman, [showing that a good diet consists not of 'food' but of certain amounts of specific nutrients -- proteins, vitamins, calories, and the like." The inscribee and original owner of this copy, Charles King, was a Pasadena-based newspaperman, author and sometime playwright; the extensive pencil underlining throughout the text can be attributed to the fact that King was using the book as research for a book he intended to write (but never finished) on a related topic. (NOTE that the pieces of the dust jacket included here (all quite tattered) are: the rear panel, both flaps, about 1/2 of the spine and about 1/4 of the badly-torn front panel. The jacket is useful for information (including a long rear-panel blurb) but hardly a candidate for restoration -- although, if you're desperate for the book to have some kind of protective wrap-around, I will, upon request, do my best to assemble and arrange the pieces inside a paper-lined archival book jacket cover in such a way as to partially "reconstruct" it so that it will cover the book.) Signed by Author .