ANTHONY, Joseph

The Gang

Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, [ca.1924]. Early reissue. Octavo (19.5cm); blue cloth with titles stamped in gilt on spine and front panel; dustjacket; 276pp. Title page is a cancel. Some trivial soil to rear gutter and upper edge of text, with purple rubber stamp of "A. George Volck Incorporated" to pastedowns and endpapers; Near Fine. Dustjacket is soiled, with numerous short tears, shallow chipping at spine ends and corner tips, and several clear tape mends verso; still a Very Good, substantially complete example. With jacket blurbs from May Sinclair, Fannie Hurst, and others.

Important early novel of Jewish-American life in New York City, set among a gang of miscreant teenagers in Jewish East Harlem, the first-generation children of the great wave of Eastern European immigration that took place in the decades leading up to and following the turn of the 20th century. The novel received excellent reviews upon publication; Maxwell Aley, reviewing the book for Publisher's Weekly in 1921, called it "...full bodied, true, slyly humorous and satisfying...the story of the boy is but the forepart to a picture of the life around him, in this case of his family and the New York streets of a decade ago..."

Ours is a somewhat curious, undated reissue, likely bound from leftover sheets of the first edition, as the title page is a cancel on a stub. The novel was originally published by Henry Holt in 1921; Anthony subsequently changed publishers, going with Bobbs-Merrill for his third novel, The Golden Village (1924), and it would make some sense that this edition of The Gang coincided with (or preceded) that switch. Regardless, the reissue must have been minuscule: there is no record of it in the Publisher's Weekly archives, and we can find no trace at all of a Bobbs-Merrill edition in WorldCat. Extremely scarce thus, and in a charmingly-illustrated original dustwrapper. HANNA 94.

Price: $250.00

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