They Had to See Paris [Photoplay Edition]

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Very Good- in Fair dj. [1929] (c.1926). First Edition Thus. Hardcover. [a decent copy, some deterioration to binding along both joints, slight bumping/fraying to several corners; the jacket, though, is heavily worn at edges and corners, with some staining to the rear panel and spine, a sizeable piece missing from the upper left corner of the rear panel, additional paper loss at the upper spine corners (taking part of the title with it), and, rather strangely, the lower couple of inches of the jacket spine seem to have had a piece of a different jacket "spliced" in]. (4 B&W film stills) Another rendition (probably not the first and definitely not the last) of the "American hicks in Paris" plot, with Pike Peters and his family, of Clearwater, Oklahoma, striking it unexpectedly oil-rich and deciding to better themselves by visiting the City of Lights to sop up some culture, which of course leads to them getting into all sort of amusing tussles with the Frenchies. This printing was a tie-in with the 1929 Fox Film Corp. film adaptation of the book, which starred (who else?) Will Rogers in his first talking picture; it's illustrated by four stills from the film, bound in. So perfect was Rogers for this kind of role that it's not much of a stretch to think that Croy (who was no stranger to the movie biz, having starred (as himself) in a series of short travelogue films in 1914/15 and having sold a previous novel, "West of the Water Tower," to Hollywood in the early 1920s) might have written this book with the lanky cowboy-turned-vaudevillian-turned-movie-star specifically in mind for the starring role. (There is no "Clearwater" in Oklahoma, for instance, but the name is suspiciously similar to that of Rogers's birthplace, Claremore.) NOTE regarding the dust jacket: it's enclosed in the same dust jacket protector (paper-lined) as when it was acquired by us; ordinarily we would swap it out for a new, unlined protector, but in this case we've left it in place because, honestly, it seems like it's sort of holding the whole thing together. .