The "Charm" Girl

New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Very Good. (c.1935). First Edition. Hardcover. (blue cloth with paper label on front cover; no dust jacket) [spine a little turned, modest wear to spine ends, light foxing on endpapers]. "The SCREAM-LINE correspondence of a radio charmer and her girl friend" (per the jacket blurb, not present on this copy), this is an amusing and topical entry in the primarily American sub-sub-genre of the epistolary comic novel that might be described as "letters from a (not-so) dumb gal (or guy)." (The vein was notably tapped by Ring Lardner ("You Know Me Al"), and really started flowing after the success of Anita Loos' "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in 1925.) This saga's protagonist is Della Dean, "a simple girl from Alicedale, Virginia," who wins a nationwide contest and goes off to the Big Apple, where she wins fame and notoriety and lots of male attention by hawking Bubble Flakes Face Soap on the radio. "Intimately illustrated" with cartoon drawings rendered in a sort of low-rent New Yorker "sophisticated" style (dames in clingy outfits, usually in the company of mustachioed middle-aged men). .