Book of the Day: nine characters, one hotel, one day

Vicki Baum, Shanghai '37 (1939; Book League of America, ed. 1940). Hardcover, dust jacket, 8.25 x 5.5, 619 pp.

Austrian-born, Vicki Baum (1888-1960) was, by turns, a professional harpist, a journalist, and a pioneer woman boxer. Turning to fiction, she scored a bestseller with 1928's Grand Hotel- the first of the interlocking stories hotel genre in fiction.

Invited to Hollywood to work on the film version- which won the 1933 Oscar for Best Picture- Baum escaped Europe before the Nazi occupation of Austria, and not past time. The Party banned her works as degenerate in 1935 and she never returned home. Baum was a prolific author, turning out over fifty novels in her long career. 21 were turned into films, and she had ten screenplay credits of her own.

Traveling widely in Asia in those last, pre-War days of Terry & The Pirates and the British Empire, Baum gathered material for what became another hotel melodrama, Shanghai '37. She set the story in a thinly-veiled version of the Cathay Hotel on Shanghai's Bund, an art deco palace that opened in 1929.

This edition is a reprint by the Book League of America, a  book club launched in 1928 by a former Macmillan editor. For $18 a year subscribers got a monthly literary magazine and a popular author's book in a numbered, common-bound series.

The League ran aground in the Depression and was bought by the Literary Guild in 1932, which sold it on to Doubleday in 1936. For the next seven years, the publisher expanded the label's offerings, including Shanghai '37, before slowly abandoning the book club field in the war years.

Our copy is a good one, the dust jacket bearing some nicks and slight tears about the edges. The yellow cover, with red debossed spine titling and a cover image, is in very good shape. The pastedowns show some browning along the hinges. The binding is sound and the text block without discoloration. The front endpaper bears a previous owner's longhand name and partial address, and a separately added ".50" on an angle.  The spine has a slight left lean.

HBB price: $20.