Baby Peggy's Own Story Book [*SIGNED*]

New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Good. 1924. 2nd printing before publication. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [worn copy, both hinges cracked but holding, front endpaper removed, rubbing/bumping at most corners, surface wear to covers, long-ago child owner's name and address in pencil on front pastedown]. (6 color plates) INSCRIBED and SIGNED by Diana Serra Cary/"Baby Peggy" (signed with both names) on the half-title page; the inscription is undated, but the content places it as no earlier than circa 2003. A collection of two dozen fairy tales other children's fare, including some classic selections (from Hans Christian Andersen, the Brother Grimm, and the like) and more then-contemporary pieces by Thornton Burgess, Joel Chandler Harris, etc. The conceit is that "Baby Peggy," who for a few brief years in the 1920s was a huge movie star, had selected "the stories I like best to read or get somebody to tell to me." I'm not saying the then-five-year-old B.P. didn't have any editorial input, mind you, but I can't help but notice that publisher Stokes' own books were the source of many of the stories, and that Peggy is depicted on the book's front cover curled up on a couch perusing a copy of "Stokes Children's Annual -- and that the book is "published under exclusive arrangement with The Principal Pictures Corporation," to whom she had just gone under contract in early 1924. In other words, it all kind of reeks of what became a hallmark of Baby Peggy's brief but shining movie career: greedy adults looking to parlay her fame into more money for themselves. (She had been a star since the age of two, and her earlier contract with Universal was purportedly for $1.5 million a year.) Little did anybody know, however, that her movie career was about to crash and burn: after appearing in eleven films (a mixture of features and shorts) released in 1924, she appeared in none at all in 1925, due to her father (who mismanaged both her career and her money) having cancelled the Principal Pictures contract when its head, Sol Lesser, refused to meet his salary demands for his daughter. She made only one more film appearance, then was able to ride her movie fame to some success as a vaudeville performer until 1929, when the stock market crash wiped out the family fortune, and she was reduced to working as a movie extra. Fortunately, she had a fulfilling later life when, as Diana Serra Cary, she wrote several well-regarded books on Hollywood history (including her own autobiography and a biography of her contemporary child star, Jackie Coogan), and lived to the ripe old age of 101, having been often feted by a new generation of silent movie buffs. At the time of her death in 2020, she was thought to have been the last living person who could genuinely have been called a star during the silent movie era. Signed by Associated .