The Best Plays of 1961-1962: The Burns Mantle Yearbook

New York/Toronto: Dodd, Mead & Company. Near Fine in Very Good dj. (c.1962). First Edition. Hardcover. [nice clean book with just the barest traces of shelfwear to the bottom edges; the jacket has a number of nicks and some very shallow chipping along the top edge, and is mildly faded at the spine]. (B&W photographs, caricature drawings) Everything you'd need to know about the theatrical season of 1961/62, with summary reports on the theatre scenes in New York, London, Paris, Washington DC, boston, Texas, and San Francisco; the casts and basic data on plays produced during the season (Broadway, Off-Broadway, Plays That Closed Out of Town, Shakespeare Festivals, and "A Selected List of Plays First Produced Outside New York City); a "Facts and Figures" section, including statistics, a "hits and flops" list, information on various awards, a bibliography of books on the theatre, and a necrology; "A Graphic Glance by Hirschfeld," 14 pages of his drawings (with others scattered throughout the volume). The "Best Plays" themselves are presented in the traditional format of this long-running series, i.e. not as the full texts but rather rendered in a kind of "mixed-narrative" format, with descriptions of the action alternating with full-dialogue excerpts from the plays. This year's Ten were: "The Caretaker," by Harold Pinter; "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"; "The Complaisant Lover," by Graham Greene; "Gideon," by Paddy Chayefsky; "A Man for All Seasons," by Robert Bolt; "Stone and Star," by Robert Ardrey; "The Night of the Iguana," by Tennessee Williams; "The Egg," by Felicien Marceau; "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Bad," by Arthur Kopit; "A Thousand Clowns," by Herb Gardner. This series maintained a remarkably consistent binding style over the decades -- black cloth with printed paper labels on the spine and front cover -- and I suspect that most people decided they looked better lined upon their shelves without their dust jackets, which likely accounts for the fact that jacketed copies have become increasingly harder to find over time. (For example, as of this writing none of the other available copies of the 1961-1962 volume still retain their original jackets.) .