Twenty-Three and a Half Hours' Leave

Illustrations by May Wilson Preston. Small 8vo. Beige paper over boards with black lettering and blue and black pictorial stamping, pictorial dust jacket. 86pp. Partly-color frontispiece, partly-color full-page plate, pictorial endpapers. Near fine/god plus. Jacket complete and fairly attractive, though a bit age toned, edgeworn and with some edge chips at top of front panel. A tight, attractive first edition in the rarely seen dust jacket -- plus a choice autograph addition: Tipped at the top of the front flyleaf is a 5" X 2½" slip bearing a handsome "Very sincerely / Mary Roberts Rinehart" signed large and bold in blue fountain pen ink, with a typed date below of April 24, 1922. Fine. Light-hearted World War One doughboy fiction about (to cite rear jacket panel) "the adventures that befell Sergeant Gray of Headquarters Troops." Tough to find such an attractive copy and in the jacket.