Young and Healthy

New York: The Vanguard Press. Very Good in Good dj. (c.1931). First Edition. Hardcover. [spine turned, moderate wear to cloth at extremities, slight bump to top front corner, vintage bookseller's label (Paul Edler & Co., San Francisco) on rear pastedown; jacket heavily edgeworn, various tiny chips and tears, wrinkling/creasing with minor paper loss at top of spine, soiling along edge of front flap]. Scrappy and moderately racy romance, of the sort that Clarke specialized in; this one is about a college student whose "only books are women's looks," but who decides to rough it for a time as a sea-going lumberman, before becoming a New York newpaper reporter (shades of the author himself). Cheap reprints of Clarke's many novels from this era ("Millie"; "Tawny"; "Confidential"; "Female"; "Alabam'"; "Impatient Virgin"; etc. etc.) are easy to find, but jacketed copies of the original editions (mostly published by Vanguard) are fairly uncommon. (The rear jacket panel has miniature black-and-white reproductions of the dust jackets on seven contemporary Vanguard Press novels, mostly of an equally trashy nature: "Bodies Are Dust," "Women Must Love," etc.) .