The Gaucho

London: The Readers Library Publishing Company Ltd.. Very Good in Very Good+ dj. [1928]. First Edition Thus. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, some wear to extremities, binding intact; the jacket shows a bit of wear along the edges and spine, with some very slight paper loss at a couple of corners and a tiny closed tear at the top of the front panel]. (Readers Library, no. 212) Series (8 sepia-toned film stills) Small-format British photoplay edition (about the size of a modern-day mass-market paperback), a "Readers Library Film Edition" novelization of the 1927 silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Lupe Velez, set in Argentina. Like all the Readers Library titles, these books were ultra-cheaply produced, so finding copies in decent condition (as this one is) is not always easy; this was has the additional virtue (which not all RL movie tie-ins did) of having a photo section bound in the middle of the book, containing eight full-page sepia-toned scenes from the film; it also includes a 4-page "Editor's Note" at the front of the book, extolling the virtues of Mr. Fairbanks and his Hollywood production set-up (shared of course with his then-wife Mary Pickford). This copy (especially the jacket) is in much nicer condition than books in the cheaply-produced Readers Library series are usually in. (NOTE that this has been tagged as no. 212 in the series, but that this number does not appear anywhere on the book or jacket; it was obtained from the Arnie Davis bibliography of photoplay editions, which also notes that the stills are different from those used in the corresponding American (Grosset & Dunlap) edition, although the text is apparently the same.) .