Mister Gumble Meets David Golder

A brief follow-up, of sorts, to Monday's post on Mr. Gumble Sits Up.

One keen-eyed friend notes that Irène Némirovsky's David Golder features amongst the "Selection of Horace Liveright Fall Books" listed on the back flap. Indeed it does. The publisher seems to have really been behind this novel, pushing it also on Gumble's back jacket.

What cost two dollars back in 1930, cannot be had today... at least not through online booksellers; only two copies of this first English-language edition are listed. Both sans jacket, the more expensive is described thusly:

There [sic] pages are clean except for some slight damp stain at the outside edge of some pages. The half-cloth binding has some staining mostly to the orange front paper cover. The corners are bumped, the spine is cocked, and there is a small tear to the crown of the binding. Webbing is exposed in the back.

"Reading copy" is the bookseller's summary. Surely not! At US$500 – a price I expect he'll get – his is a copy for the collector. This is a reading copy:

Sold in the original French for a mere C$9.99. New.