"IN OTHER WORDS, A COT BEFORE THE HORSE": SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF GROUCHO’S FIRST BOOK, BEDS

MARX, Groucho. Beds. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, (1930). Slim octavo, original pictorial paper boards, original dust jacket. $1350.

First edition of Groucho’s first book, told with the lively deadpan humor of Groucho Marx, in very scarce dust jacket.

Sparkling with the inimitable deadpan humor of Groucho Marx, Beds enlists the aid of authorities such as Freud, Bernard Shaw, Herbert Hoover, Thomas Edison, Rip Van Winkle, monobedders and polybedders, Mark Twain, and a chorus of circular, zig-zag and doughnut sleepers. "My experience is," writes Groucho, "that people are most likely to listen to reason when in bed." If Napoleon had stayed in bed, for example, "he would never have met his Waterloo, but he probably would have met some one a great deal more interesting." First printing, with Rinehart logo on the copyright page. Containing frontispiece and four full-page photographic illustrations. Serialized in the magazine College Humor (1929). Bookplate.

Interior very fresh with lightest occasional foxing, scant edge-wear to bright dust jacket. An excellent near-fine copy.