[Collection of five books, inscribed by the author to Otto Kraus, her Czech language teacher, comprising:] Mozart. [And:] Of Lena Geyer. [And:] The Valley of Decision. [And:] East Side, West Side. [And:] Too Strong for Fantasy

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967. First editions. 5 vols. 8vo. Original cloth without dust jackets. Two titles with some minor rubbing, else Near Fine. First editions. 5 vols. 8vo. Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), daughter of soprano Alma Gluck (and the step-daughter of violinist Efrem Zimbalist) was raised in cosmopolitan circles and educated at Wellesley and in France. She was an early staff writer at the New Yorker, and in the Thirties was a music critic. At Scribner's her editor was Maxwell Perkins and her first book was a well-received biography of Mozart familiar to all lovers of Mozart. Her novel The Valley of Decision was a best-seller and was filmed. During World War II she worked for the Czechoslovak cause and from 1945 she divided her time between New York and Prague until the Communist coup d'etat in 1948

Marcia Davenport began to learn Czech during the war; her teacher was Otto Kraus, attached to the Czechoslovak consulate in New York (and later commercial attaché during the brief postwar government of Masaryk). A firm friendship arose, as the inscriptions on these books document. In 1946 Davenport was witness to Kraus's wedding in New York City and thereafter inscribed books to the couple.

Mozart is inscribed "To Otto Kraus With appreciation for your beautiful Praha, which I first learned to love through working on this book; and in the certainty that we will all meet there in freedom and happiness again. Marcia Davenport New York November 1941."

Davenport's autobiography, Too Strong for Fantasy (1967), is inscribed To Vlasta and Otto Kraus in old friendship, Marcia Davenport, New York, September 1967."Davenport, who never wrote about her connections with Czechoslovakia before this autobiography, briefly recalls her efforts to learn Czech at p. 292.