Jacob's Ladder

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1935. 1st Edition (A). Hardcover. [a bit of shelfwear to top and bottom edges, teensy bumping and miniscule fraying at a couple of corners, very faint dampstain to bottom of text block (no trace of it inside the book); jacket browned and lightly stained at spine, a bit of paper loss at spine extremities and at top right corner of front panel]. Gentle social satire about the upward rise of Jacob Hiram Bates, who gets his entrepreneurial start in a small Vermont village as a seller of patent medicine for dogs (Bates Animal Elixir), and eventually winds up "as purveyor of expensive cosmetics to the socially elite, and the possessor of a glittering chateau on Long Island." Not to worry, though, he's "a completely likable person," and even though there's a lot of nonsense taking place around him (generated by "his rather chuckle-headed children" and the social arbiter that he hires to assist him and his family up the ladder of society), in the end "he emerges very much the same simple-minded, warm-hearted person that he was when the ascent began." (This is Arthur Train, after all, not Nathanael West.) .