VANCE, Ethel [pseud. of Grace Zaring Stone]. Escape. London: Collins. 1939. 8vo. First British edition, first printing. Publisher’s striking cherry red cloth lettered in black to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by A. E. Barlow. A splendid copy, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and square, with some faint spots to the textblock edges. An excellent wood engraving bookplate designed by Robert Gibbings for the Book Society tipped in to the front endpaper, unspoiled, and with two single pages from the Book Society Committee review of the novel by Sylvia Lynd, which suggests even the publishers knew not the author’s real name. The dust jacket unclipped (8s 6d net) and very gently bumped and rubbed to extremities, but a vibrant, fine copy overall.
The author’s most famous work, a scathing anti-Nazi novel of daring deeds made by regular Germans amid the tightening fist of the Third Reich, by way of the titular escape of a revered American actress who unwillingly must return to Germany only to face death from a here nameless tyranny. An immediate success, it was a Book Society Choice on both sides of the Atlantic, compared to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, the author guessed as a mix of Vicki Baum and R. C. Hutchinson by Lynd reviewing. Ethel Vance was in fact the pseudonym adopted by the American author Grace Zaring Stone, used so as not to jeopardise the life of her daughter, Eleanor Spencer Stone Perényi, who was living with her husband, Baron Zsigmond Perényi, in pro-Fascist Hungary on publication. Basis for the 1940 film of the same name starring Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Conrad Veidt and Nazimova. An uncommon book. The Gibbings bookplate, one of the Book Society’s best commissions, is scarce.
VANCE, Ethel [pseud. of Grace Zaring Stone]. Escape. London: Collins. 1939. 8vo. First British edition, first printing. Publisher’s striking cherry red cloth lettered in black to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by A. E. Barlow. A splendid copy, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and square, with some faint spots to the textblock edges. An excellent wood engraving bookplate designed by Robert Gibbings for the Book Society tipped in to the front endpaper, unspoiled, and with two single pages from the Book Society Committee review of the novel by Sylvia Lynd, which suggests even the publishers knew not the author’s real name. The dust jacket unclipped (8s 6d net) and very gently bumped and rubbed to extremities, but a vibrant, fine copy overall.
The author’s most famous work, a scathing anti-Nazi novel of daring deeds made by regular Germans amid the tightening fist of the Third Reich, by way of the titular escape of a revered American actress who unwillingly must return to Germany only to face death from a here nameless tyranny. An immediate success, it was a Book Society Choice on both sides of the Atlantic, compared to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, the author guessed as a mix of Vicki Baum and R. C. Hutchinson by Lynd reviewing. Ethel Vance was in fact the pseudonym adopted by the American author Grace Zaring Stone, used so as not to jeopardise the life of her daughter, Eleanor Spencer Stone Perényi, who was living with her husband, Baron Zsigmond Perényi, in pro-Fascist Hungary on publication. Basis for the 1940 film of the same name starring Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Conrad Veidt and Nazimova. An uncommon book. The Gibbings bookplate, one of the Book Society’s best commissions, is scarce.
