Family Crisis

New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Very Good+. 1940. 2nd printing. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good sound copy, light shelfwear, minor dust-stain to bottom of text block, slight fading to spine cloth, rubber-stamped bookseller's name on front pastedown (Bertrand Smith's Acres of Books, Long Beach, Calif.), vintage bookplate on ffep]. The titular "crisis" was basically the author's family life and business during a five-year period from 1895 to 1900, during which his father, following a run of bad luck and failed ventures in Chicago, tried to make a go of a commercial laundry establishment in Dayton, Ohio, enlisting his wife and three sons in the effort to keep it afloat in the face of various trials and tribulations (equipment malfunctions, a fire, labor union troubles). The verdict of the New York Times critic was that while "the writing is without any particular beauty or distinction, it has clarity and directness [and] presents a sufficiently vivid picture of a special phase of American life at the close of one industrial period and the beginning of another and a very different one, the end of little businesses with few employes, the coming of big business and big unions." .