Glass Houses

New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Very Good. 1926. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [solid clean copy, slight fading to spine cloth, teensy bit of fraying at a couple of corners, one-time owner's name and (faint) address in pencil on front endpaper, vintage bookseller's label (J.W. Robinson Co., Los Angeles) on rear pastedown]. Novel set amidst the social circles of Washington, D.C., by an author described in the original jacket blurb (jacket NOT present on this copy) as a "Chicago-born Polish countess," as indeed she was, at least for a few years. She published two novels during the 1920s under the Gizycka name -- rather cheekily, to say the least, since she had quite publicly and messily divorced the abusive Count Gizycka years earlier. (And just to rub it in, the other book, "Fall Flight," was a fictionalized account of that marriage.) Much better known as "Cissy" Patterson, she was a sister of Joseph Medill Patterson, and thus a partial heiress to the Chicago Tribune fortune. She eventually went into journalism herself in a big way, becoming the first woman to edit and publish a major American newspaper. She was editor of Hearst's Washington Herald for a number of years before buying it and the Washington Times and merging them in 1939 into the Washington Times-Herald, and thus was herself a significant figure in the very Washington society she had written about in this novel. A passionate and outspoken woman, she once described herself as "a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch." (Not an especially rare book, and you could probably save a couple of dollars by buying a slightly cheaper copy from another seller -- but don't you think that all this background information is worth those few extra bucks?) .