[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy

[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928].

Price: $12,500.00

Unbound. Original tempura painting for the dust jacket of Carl Van Vechten's novel *Spider Boy* by noted gay artist and designer Ronald McRae. The image measuring 6.5" x 7.5", matted and framed to 17.5" x 13". Unsigned (as is the finished dust jacket). Fine. A Hollywood star waves to the adoring multitudes as her entourage looks on, and a flash camera goes off in the left foreground. The painted lettering was changed to an entirely different font for the finished jacket, and the rest of the image shows minor variations, mostly in color. A very nearly final version, and the only existing painting of the jacket of which we are aware. An iconic and wonderfully evocative image of the Jazz Age. The satiric novel featured a mildly successful playwright, Ambrose Deacon, who is lured to Hollywood and is pressed into service as a screenwriter for an egotistical superstar. Ambrose has no clue about film but rapidly discovers that no one in Hollywood cares, as long as he lends his modest prestige to tinsel town's pretensions. [With]: a second printing of the novel, very good in very good dustwrapper.

Item #368334

item image

Item #368334 [Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy. Carl VAN VECHTEN, Ronald McRAE.
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy
[Original Dust Jacket Art]: Spider Boy

Carl Van Vechten
birth name: Carl Van Vechten
born: 6/17/1880
died: 12/21/1964

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Biography

American novelist and music and drama critic, an influential figure in New York literary circles in the 1920s; he was an early enthusiast of American black culture. - Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literaturemore