About this Item
Hardcover in mustard-yellow cloth, lettered and illustrated in brown, retaining an unusual Rutgers University Bookstore-issued protective dust jacket/book cover in black, cream, and Rutgers scarlet. The title page identifies Mitchell with Technical High School, Springfield, Massachusetts, and describes the volume as a "New-Type Reader." Copyright is explicitly 1933 by Howard Mitchell. Bibliographic records confirm this Mitchell adaptation as the D. C. Heath 1933 simplified edition, and contemporary educational listings identify it specifically as Le Petit Chose, new simplified edition by Mitchell.
This was not simply a reprinting of Daudet's nineteenth-century novel. Mitchell deliberately reconstructed it as an instructional French reader, explaining in his preface that the text was simplified to encourage direct comprehension, oral practice, and development of an active vocabulary; he reduced the working vocabulary to approximately 1,650 words. Chapters combine French text with preliminary vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, followed by a substantial French-English vocabulary section. Numerous lively black-and-white illustrations appear throughout. The adaptation evidently had a substantial life in American language instruction.
What transforms this particular copy is its Rutgers student provenance. The surviving bookstore jacket announces "RUTGERS / THE STATE UNIVERSITY" around the university shield dated 1766, with an enormous scarlet "R" filling the rear panel. The front flap is printed "This Book Belongs to" and "RUTGERS UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE" and was completed by student Pat Torsiello, with a Maplewood, New Jersey address and handwritten course/class information. The student's name also appears on the front free endpaper, including an earlier form crossed out and rewritten. The rear flap's unused "THIS SPACE FOR DOODLING" panel is a particularly charming piece of campus-bookstore ephemera.
Condition: VG+ book / VG Rutgers University Bookstore jacket. The mustard cloth remains attractive with strong brown lettering and pictorial decoration, modest handling/age wear, and a sound binding. Interior pages are notably clean and supple for an instructional copy, with the principal markings concentrated in the ownership areas. Former student's inscriptions as described. The bookstore jacket shows expected evidence of actual campus use: rubbing and surface scuffing to the glossy black panels, creasing, edge wear, small chips and short tears, particularly at the spine ends and upper corners, and general age toning to the cream borders. Importantly, it remains substantially complete with both printed flaps intact. The student provenance is a feature rather than something I would minimize in the condition statement.
Seller Inventory # NF.MIT.1933.1
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