Word: marked
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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This week that teeming literature is celebrated in a 425-page volume called San Francisco's Literary Frontier. An absorbing book, it contains a big cast, centring on Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller. But at least a dozen of its 45 secondary and minor characters are as interesting if not as important as these. They shuttle in & out of a narrative brightened by anecdote, distinguished by excellent writing, weighted by a shrewd understanding of frontier social forces. The six-year work of a 37-year-old professor of English at San Diego State College, San Francisco...
California gold and Nevada silver built the mansions on Nob Hill (where Mark Twain dreamed of living some day), bought the elegant, satin-lined carriages that rolled over San Francisco's plank streets. They paid for San Franciscans' one-pound gold watches, their champagne (seven bottles to Bostonians' one), their imported building stone from China, accounted as well for San Francisco's 1,000 yearly suicides...
...counteract the resulting sequestered existence, the wives of these men have decided to band together for their mutual amusement. . . . The symbol of the organization will be a question mark upheld by a pair of wings (worn upside down while the old man is at home...
...Question Mark. It is this vast, untapped, bookless audience that most excites those concerned with increasing U. S. book-reading. It has been claimed that if a way could be found to irrigate this desert, U. S. book sales would soar by 85%. Most observers agree that there are only two possible channels for this irrigation: 1) cheaper books, 2) better distribution...
Next printing of Pocket Books was 25,000 copies of each title. With these in his pack, Prospector de Graff will plunge boldly into the great U. S. literary desert. Behind him he leaves a big question mark: Can he equal the success of Penguin Books and Tauchnitz Editions in Europe (combined sales of 25,000,000 a year...