John Perona's El Morocco Family Album. With photographs by Jerome Zerbe and an introduction by Lucius Beebe.

New York: (Privately printed), 1937. First edition. Folio (10 1/2 x 14 inches). 62, 93, index), (1) pp. Four pages (including title page) bear text, the remainder are packed with numerous photographs of all the famous patrons of this infamous New York institution. Publisher's blue cloth with white cover lettering, zebra-pattern endpapers. Some wear to extremities and a small split to the cloth at midway on the front joint, title page with mild foxing. A clean and attractive copy overall.The chief attraction to this book lies primarily in the photographs; we find Errol Flynn, Gloria Vanderbilt, Johnny Walker, Prince Serge Obolensky, Jack Dempsey, Prince Guido Colonna, Ginger Rogers and Jose Prado all rubbing elbows and having a fine time. The prohibition brought together, here at the El Morocco for likely the first time in American history, the blue-bloods and the nouveaux riche. An unthinkable proposition merely 20 years prior. Actors, athletes, models and suchlike usually wouldn't have dared to enter the haunts of America's old money families but it seems Perona's El Morocco broke down that barrier (at least for some time). Of perhaps more interest than the photographs is the acerbic and delightful introduction by Lucius Beebe, the first openly gay columnist in America. In his introduction we read - "El Morocco, John Perona, and consequently, this book are all the products of an emergent evolution. Given the entire antecedent social background of New York and so America it would still have been impossible to foresee the usurpation of the glitter scene of the most glittering city in the land by a single, and in itself, not overly resplendent hideaway in an entirely anonymous side street. Ten years ago no seer or prophet, not even that arch-astronomer Myra Kingsley could have read in the conjunction of the spheres the sudden and deafening explosion of Morocco across the urban consciousness of New York. If stars fell, great winds blew upon the earth, Mrs. Stanwood Menken appeared with a displaced coiffure or other signs and portents were manifest nobody paid any attention to them. Nobody foresaw that through the agency of a constantly diminishing dance floor and a miniature camera all the Wrong People [i.e. actors, etc] were overnight going to become the Right People, while all the Right People of yesterday were going to fold up and disappear from human ken as though they had been shown to a table in the back room of the "21". Without any premonitory warning, what everyone had imagined to be society simply ceased to exist anywhere in Manhattan except in the exhibits of the Museum of the City of New York and in That Page in The Times where they languished and grew gray in slightly frayed accounts of The Charity Ball... Anyway they are true martyrs to magnums, the children of the night and leaner and hungrier generations will look at their likeness in these pages with envy." When Prohibition ended so did this fascinating social Pax Inebriatus. The Brahmins went their way and the hoi polloi theirs and eventually they just became East Coast Money and West Coast Money.