Lewd Moon: A Narrative in Rhythm

(price-clipped) [a good sound copy, modest wear to extremities, old bookseller's rubber stamp (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach, California) on front pastedown; the jacket is heavily edgeworn, top and bottom edges internally reinforced with brown paper tapes, with various bits of paper loss but nothing too dire apart from a ragged diagonal tear near the top of the spine]. (pen and ink drawings) A long -- really long (668 pages) -- verse narrative depicting the life of a Mississippi river town around the turn of the 20th century. "This book is fiction, and the scene of its story, River Town, on the Iowa shore of the Mississippi, is entirely imaginary, as are all its characters -- excepting only George Hudson, who had his counterpart in reality." One contemporary critic's judgment: "It is overflowing with lust, violence, brutality, vice, intrigue, and yet through it all comes forth a beautiful story of love and faith." That "entirely imaginary" notation is precisely the sort of thing that raises at least one of my eyebrows, and my preliminary research suggests that "River City" might actually have been a fictionalized version of Davenport, Iowa -- which around 1900 had a significant number of brothels (a major element of this book are efforts to deal with "the District," which is under the protection of the town's corrupt political establishment) and (per Wikipedia) "150 illegal saloons" (for a population of just 35,000). There was also a notorious area of Davenport known as Bucktown, once called "the wickedest city in America," and the book contains a reference to an area by that very name. There is also a considerable presence in the book -- as there was in Davenport itself -- of the town's African-American community. It's possible that a deeper dive into Davenport's history might reveal the real-life model for "George Hudson," who in the book is the father of one of its tragic figures, a lawyer named John Hudson -- but I'll leave that to the purchaser of this book. ****NOTE that additional postage charges will be assessed for international shipping of this heavy book; if this concerns you, please contact us for a shipping quote before placing your order. As always at ReadInk, domestic Media Mail shipping is free.****.…