?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
SMITH, THORNE. Topper: An Improbable Adventure. 8vo, original gilt-lettered burgundy cloth; pictorial dust jacket by C.V. Farrow, overall light rubbing, slightly tanned, areas of professional restoration to edges and folds, corners clipped but $2.00 price intact; discreet bookseller's ticket at top of rear pastedown, final text leaf trimmed short at the binder's, slight separation at portion of gutter at rear flyleaf. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1926
first edition. a superb copy. The first adventures of Cosmo Topper and his ghost friends, George and Marion Kerby. Cary Grant and Constance Bennett played the ghosts opposite Roland Young's Topper in the 1937 screwball comedy. "Thorne Smith's favorite hero is a man who, settled largely by chance in a dull life, discovers that he has a capacity for pleasure and at once finds opportunities swarming round him" (Carl Van Doren, The American Novel, 1940). Very scarce in dust jacket. The last copy appearing at auction (Christie's New York, the Lackritz Collection, Part 3, 2003) described as having "some insect damage." The present copy in a bright, clean binding, an excellent example in a skillfully repaired dust jacket.
