MAYNARD, Lawrance M. The Pig is Fat. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. 1930. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s bright yellow cloth lettered in red to the spine and upper board, in the wonderful wraparound dust jacket designed by Miguel Covarrubias. A fine copy. The cloth very bright and sharp, the red topstain vivid. The binding tight and square, the contents fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped ($2.00) with a few very tiny nicks to corners and tips, and with publisher’s advertising slip of vagabond writer Jim Tully’s high praise for this novel affixed to front panel corner.
Benny Wagner, son of a saloon owner, eyes one last hooray on the eve of National Prohibition. Succumbing to the notion the family requires a new stream of income, Benny slowly entangles himself into the criminal underworld. Maynard’s prose is charismatic, accurate, and often zany, showing ‘the disintegration of a personality shown with startling clarity’ through murder, dope-peddling, and the jail cell. It swims on the surface of seriousness at times, and with a sharp political edge—it’s the laws mandated here that have caused previously-good-fella Benny to delve into crime, his father and indeed Benny is sure. That thesis comes with a bite of reality, too—Maynard wrote the novel while serving a seven year sentence for ‘Breaking, Entry and Larceny’. Algernon Tassin, a Harvard professor, sent him a typewriter and H. L. Mencken encouraged him to write while incarcerated. Several similar stories, of a semi-criminous life, and of tramping, appeared, but this proved to be his only major output. It was republished by Wildside Press in 2024. The dust jacket designer, Miguel Covarrubias, was a Mexican heavyweight artist, illustrator and caricaturist deeply entwined in the Harlem jazz scene, illustrating many works by its progenitors. Scarce in jacket.
MAYNARD, Lawrance M. The Pig is Fat. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. 1930. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s bright yellow cloth lettered in red to the spine and upper board, in the wonderful wraparound dust jacket designed by Miguel Covarrubias. A fine copy. The cloth very bright and sharp, the red topstain vivid. The binding tight and square, the contents fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped ($2.00) with a few very tiny nicks to corners and tips, and with publisher’s advertising slip of vagabond writer Jim Tully’s high praise for this novel affixed to front panel corner.
Benny Wagner, son of a saloon owner, eyes one last hooray on the eve of National Prohibition. Succumbing to the notion the family requires a new stream of income, Benny slowly entangles himself into the criminal underworld. Maynard’s prose is charismatic, accurate, and often zany, showing ‘the disintegration of a personality shown with startling clarity’ through murder, dope-peddling, and the jail cell. It swims on the surface of seriousness at times, and with a sharp political edge—it’s the laws mandated here that have caused previously-good-fella Benny to delve into crime, his father and indeed Benny is sure. That thesis comes with a bite of reality, too—Maynard wrote the novel while serving a seven year sentence for ‘Breaking, Entry and Larceny’. Algernon Tassin, a Harvard professor, sent him a typewriter and H. L. Mencken encouraged him to write while incarcerated. Several similar stories, of a semi-criminous life, and of tramping, appeared, but this proved to be his only major output. It was republished by Wildside Press in 2024. The dust jacket designer, Miguel Covarrubias, was a Mexican heavyweight artist, illustrator and caricaturist deeply entwined in the Harlem jazz scene, illustrating many works by its progenitors. Scarce in jacket.
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