About this Item
Stated First Printing of this three-in-one volume. The three books are Happy Days where Mr. Mencken 'recalls his boyhood in the Baltimore of the eighties,' Newspaper Days, 'the period covered is that of his professional nonage', and Heathen Days, covering 'the highlights of forty active years. Mr. Mencken has set down some of the juicier and more irreverent of his recollections.' Of Happy Days, the New York Herald Tribune reviewer wrote 'The words of joy pour out of him with a walloping exuberance which no American since Mark Twain has matched.' Of Newspaper Days, the Herald Tribune reviewer said 'Read it and shed a vagrant tear for your own lost youth. The Old Master was never mellower.' And of Heathen Days the reviewer from the New York Times Book Review, Carl Van Doren, wrote 'Hilarious episodes, picked out of Mr. Mencken's opulent memory and told with his immense delight in idiocies and rascalities. He writes like a man to whom happiness is constitutional.' You can see the blue covers in the photos. They are very clean. I don't see any soiling. The gilt lettering on the spine is bright, however little bits of it are faded off (fifth photo). There's a wrinkle right above the bottom edge of the spine and a very tiny closed tear off the top edge of the spine, along with a bit of crinkling. The cover edges are in excellent shape. So are the corners. The page edges are quite clean. The top page edge looks as if it may have had a darker stain, maybe blue, that has faded in large part. It looks just fine. The middle page edge is deckled or rough-cut. It looks like they did a very good job. The book is square and the spine is straight. The binding is very solid from cover to cover with nicely tight pages and nicely tight covers as well. This is no small thing given that there are some 900 or so pages in the book, though the book is not as thick as you would expect with so many pages, the pages are thin. The interior of the book is in very good condition. The pages are exceptionally clean. Scrolling through, I found only two instances of soiling, both on the semi-glossy pages with photographs of Mencken. Each has two very small tan spots just off the white margin off the top edge, not near to the photographs. There are three photographs in total, each one preceding the title page of each volume. The condition of the pages is very good. I found one teeny tiny tear off the top edge of one page, obviously very far from the print. The only other imperfection I found was toward the end of the book, seven consecutive pages had bottom corners that were produced very slightly longer than the other pages corners and five had little creases and two had tiny losses, all very far from the print. I also saw a small group pages that had a very vague impression, not really a crease, at their top corners. In other words not much of anything. There are no placeholder creases in the book. There are no markings or attachments. The previous owner signed his name off the top edge of the rear inside cover along with the month and year, 10/47. There is no other writing to be found anywhere in the book. You can see the dust jacket in the first three photos. There are only a couple of other copies of this three-volume first edition for sale on the Internet that still have their dust jackets. I don't think I need to add much to what you can see in the photos of the jacket. The loss at the top and bottom edges of the spine does not come near to the lettering. The flaps are in decent condition. They look clean. There is a very tiny scuff/loss off the top edge of the front flap (1/8th"). The same is the case off the rear flap, around the same size, just slightly larger. The jacket is NOT price-clipped, not clipped at all. I have always had it in a fitted protective cover. Seller Inventory # 004462
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Bibliographic Details
Title: The Days Of H. L. Mencken: Happy Days, ...
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Publication Date: 1947
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good Plus
Dust Jacket Condition: Fair
Edition: 1st Edition
