The Captain Comes to Eden

Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company. Very Good in Good dj. (c.1953). First Edition. Hardcover. [corners bumped, moderate shelfwear, slight fading to cloth at top of spine, vintage bookseller's rubber-stamped name on front pastedown (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach, California); jacket rubbed and edgeworn, faded at spine, slight paper loss at both ends of spine, small tear at top of front panel, soiling to rear panel]. Uncommon comic novel about a once-magnificent but now hopelessly run-down old hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, occupied primarily by little old ladies whose incessant demands for renovations cause the manager to throw up his hands and tell them to "take the hotel and run it themselves." The ladies "are delighted and begin making wonderful plans, but their fun stops when a new manager arrives, a retired Navy man [who] knows nothing about hotel management and less about old ladies. He's convinced, however, that with Navy discipline, rigidly applied, he can manage both the hotel and the 'dratted females,' as he calls them. But the captain does not count on the subtle strength of women." Although very little seems to be made of the L.A. location -- virtually the whole thing takes place in the hotel itself, and after the Wilshire Boulevard mention on the first page there is scant reference to anything geographically or culturally specific (apart from one of the tenants being a retired actress) -- according to the jacket blurb the author was in the hotel business "in California," so one can reasonably presume that at least she was writing wherewhich she knew -- yet another victim, it would seem, of the "I could write a book" syndrome (another sure sign of which being that she apparently never wrote another one). .