Mr. Dooley in Peace and War [Publisher's Personal Copy, with his Note]

Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1898. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. First edition of the author's first book and the personal copy of publisher Laurens Maynard, with his signature and a short notation on the front free endpaper. and a ca. 100-word penciled note by him on the front flyleaf. A very good copy in original green cloth binding. Above Maynard's signature, in his hand, is a note reading "75 copies of 1st edition bound untrimmed." A newspaper clipping of a "Mr. Dooley" column titled "On a Cabinet Meeting" is affixed to front flyleaf and its verso, and there is offsetting to both facing pages (one blank, the other the half-title page). Above the clipping is this note, signed "L.M.":This was one of the first of the Dooley articles on the Spanish War. [Illegible] was nicely reprinted in the newspapers. John D. Long then Secretary of the Navy told me he took it with him to a cabinet meeting and, showing it to another cabinet officer Pres. McKinley inquired what it was and taking it read it aloud with great amusement. "After that" said Secy Long, the reading of the latest Dooley article was a regular part of the programme at the Cabinet meetings." For some reason which I could never ascertain Dunne would not include this article in his book. Finely Peter Dunne (1867-1936) was a Chicago-born journalists whose parents were Irish immigrants. In 1892, he began writing for the Chicago Evening Post, where he developed weekly series of monologues delivered by a fictional bartender named Mr. Dooley, who lived in a working class Irish neighborhood on Chicago's south side. "Between 1893 and 1900, some 300 Dooley pieces appeared in Chicago newspapers. Taken together, they form a coherent body of work, in which a vivid, detailed world comes into existence—that of a self-contained immigrant culture with its own set of customs and ceremonies and a social structure rooted in family, geography, and occupation. The Chicago Dooley pieces contain valuable chunks of social history and pioneering contributions to the development of literary realism in America" (American National Biography). .