The Great Sale

New York: Alfred H. King. Near Fine. 1933. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a nice clean copy with only faint shelfwear, vintage bookplate on front pastedown, small vintage bookseller's label at lower corner of rear pastedown (Stern Brothers)]. Novel about the efforts of the young owner of a department store in an unnamed Midwestern city (who has inherited the business from his father) to keep the business afloat during the darkest days of the Great Depression -- driven not just by his own self-interest, but by his acute awareness of the impact the store's failure would have on its numerous employees, and on the community. (The scheme that's finally cooked up is to have a massive store-wide sale. Imagine what Frank Capra -- or Preston Sturges -- might have done with this material.) (And speaking of the movies: I've seen it asserted by a couple of other booksellers that "John Bascom" was a pseudonym for future screenwriter/producer Jerry Wald, but having been unable to vertify this independently I am hesitant to give it further oxygen. The Alfred H. King publishing house -- like others such as the Macaulay Company, Greenberg, and William Godwin -- specialized in sensationalistic (not to say trashy) fiction, produced largely for the rental-library marketplace, and many of those books were, in fact, written under pseudonyms, and provided some relatively easy money for both not-yet-established writers and for pulpmeisters who were used to getting paid by the word for grinding out dreck. If this was that kind of novel, then I'd be more ready to believe that Wald -- already at the time a well-established New York newspaper columnist -- might have written in "on the side" for a few extra bucks. However, the book is both longer (at 320 pages) and of somewhat more serious intent than the typical product of such publishing firms. Furthermore (although admittedly this might just be jacket-blurb b.s.) the original jacket text for this novel (quoted from another source) states that author Bascom "knows the American department store from actual experience," which, if true, does not line up with the known facts about Wald's early career. Maybe the definitive answer to this little mystery lies among the Jerry Wald papers, which have been sitting uncatalogued and inaccessible at the USC Cinematic Arts Library for 38 years.) The book, in any event, is pretty scarce, with OCLC recording just six institutional copies. .