CROW, Carl

With Dust Jacket: Four Hundred Million Customers The Experiences - Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him [400 Million]

New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, (1937). G. Sapojnikoff [Georgii Avksent'ievich Sapojnikoff; Sapajou]. Early Reprint. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. Large 8vo. Pp. [9], 10-316, [1]. Illustrated with spot illustrations throughout by G. Sapojnikoff. Decorated endpapers. Bound in black cloth with gilt title block on spine. Slight evidence of wear, with front board just a trifle bowed. In the full color-illustrated dust jacket, price-clipped and with edge-wear, but with brilliant colors. Please see photos. Very Good / Very Good-. Item #6243

Carl Crow offers his experiences in translating Chinese tastes and distastes for things Western, from poker (he sold untold numbers of a guide to the card game) to cheese (a failed experiment in Chinese marketing). He relates the story of chop suey, sold in nearly every quarter of the world ... except China: "Beggar's hash, it was first fed to drunk miners in San Francisco, 1849, by the proprietor of the first US Chinese restaurant. Cobbled together with diners' leftovers, it was all he could do to avoid violence. Such are the nuggets found in Crow's expansive narrative.

From the mid-1920s-on, Sapojnikoff, who worked under the nom-de-plume "Sapajou," was staffer on the North-China Daily News, the foremost English-language newspaper in China and perhaps all of the Far East. The whimsy and dynamism of his illustrations warranted work for many book projects. The bright dust jacket is now housed in a removable, clear archival sleeve.

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Price: $75.00