Control: A Pageant of Engineering Progress [*SIGNED*]

New York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Good. (c.1930). First Edition. Hardcover. (paper-covered boards over black cloth; no dust jacket, probably as issued) [well-worn at all edges and extremities, partial splitting of black cloth along rear joint]. (11 B&W plates) INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "To / Frank P. Bevan / with hearty thanks for / his cooperation / G.P.B. / Dec. 1930." This short play was "written specially for the Fiftieth Anniversary of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers," employed both live actors (non-professionals, it appears) and film segments to illustrate "the remarkable development of mechanical engineering in the past fifty years, and the growing sense in such work that beauty may and must be combined with utility and power." In the play -- sorry, pageant -- which was given just three performances (all on the same day), there appear both symbolic figures (Curiosity, Intelligence, Finance, etc.) and historical personages (Michael Faraday, George Stephenson, Thomas Edison); judging from the four scene stills reproduced in the book, it was an eminently stagy affair, with guys in period dress (they are, of course, all men) standing around striking poses. The other seven illustrations in the book are reproductions of the costumes designed for the affair by Frank Poole Bevan, to whom this copy was inscribed by the mastermind of the whole thing, George Pierce Baker -- not himself an engineer, but a longtime professor of English at Harvard and later Yale (and founder of the Yale School of Drama), who was renowned as a dramatic theorist and teacher, and famously the author of the 1919 book "Dramatic Technique." Signed by Author .