Playboy

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons (A Minton Balch Book). Near Fine. 1936. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a nice-looking book with just a touch of wear at a couple of corners, one small little pit-mark on front cover]. Comic novel, "first published in serial form in The American Magazine under the title of Keep the Change," about the rather undisciplined heir to a chain-department-store fortune, who's ultimately redeemed by the love of a good woman (with the unlikely name of Betsy Ross Beal). The author seems to have been somewhat slumming in screwball-comedyland (e.g. Thorne Smith or Eric Hatch, or maybe even P.G. Wodehouse) with this standard "poor little rich boy" narrative. One contemporary reviewer scored it as undeserving of special attention, summing it up thus: "It is written with an up to the minute understanding of smart dialogue. It avoids the platitudes of high society and big business. Its influence is wholesome as a corrective of highly colored and cheap urban romance with money, but it stops there." It was announced in June 1936 that the movie rights to the book had been purchased by Paramount, with the intention of adapting it as a vehicle for George Raft, but no film ever came to be. .