Best Seller: The Story of a Young Man Who Came to New York to Write a Novel About a Young Man Who Came to New York to Write a Novel

Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Very Good-. (c.1930). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [decent clean copy, moderately shelfworn, ffep removed with consequent weakening of front hinge; attractive vintage custom bookplate on 2nd (remaining) ffep; possibly an ex-lending library book, although the only indicator is a letter-number code handwritten on the title page]. "A ribald picture of the endless making of modern books, a galuptious harlequinade cast in the publishing world of New York. It was written by a man in the heart of the business, who has observed and relished with unholy glee its aspects, esoteric, manifold and ridiculous; who loves the great game and so is privileged to laugh at it; and who has been clever enough to construct against this provocative background a novel swift and unfailingly amusing. The reader will meet in these pages -- and many of them under their own names -- scores of people familiar to the literary world of to-day." (Quoted from the dust jacket on a different copy of the book; NOT present on this copy.) It was reported in the press at the time of publication that the author worked in some capacity at Harper & Brothers; he apparently never wrote another novel, although he did write an advice-to-writers book, decades later (published under his own name, Allen Clark Marple), entitled "Write It and Sell It," published in 1964. .