The Lone Dinner Plate

(price-clipped) [moderately heavy shelfwear to bottom edges of covers, bumping to top of spine; jacket shows general handling wear, slight paper loss at several corners, a couple of what look like tape-shadows on the front panel, a few tiny edge-tears]. (B&W photographs) Memoir by an Indiana native who joined the U.S. Army at the age of nineteen (in 1898) "to avenge the sinking of the Maine," and was shipped off to fight in the Philippines, an experience to which he devotes several chapters of his book. He eventually settled in Los Angeles post-WWI, where his various careers included partnering in a commercial art firm (which dissolved when his partner turned out to be a swindler -- although based on the several examples of their product reproduced here, I'd say they deserved to fail on aesthetic grounds) and being a sanitation and housing inspector for the city. (His chapters on the latter activity are rather entertaining.) Per the jacket blurb, the book incorporates the author's "amusing and penetrating" observations on "housing, the dozens of ways your butcher can cheat you, war, farming, and law." (He also includes a rather surprisingly grisly account of his wife's death from cancer. The book's title, it's explained, "derives from the fact that after many years he now lives alone" -- although the expression on his face in the jacket portrait drawing suggests he may not have been TOO broken up about that.)

Product Info

Publisher: Vantage Press, Inc.

Year: (c.1952)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

ReadInk

Address: 2261 West 21st St. Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.readinkbooks.com

Country: United States