One Man's Family Looks at Life

no place: Standard Brands Incorporated, 1938. Unpaginated, about 28p., photo illustrated throughout, sewn text bound in 7.5 x 5.5 inch pictorial paper over boards. A few flecks of offset white to cover decoration, background off-white is toned slightly, a nice copy of a fragile item. According to a scene-setting paragraph at the beginning, "The Barbours" live in "the sea cliff area of San Francisco." Sea Cliff? out of towners don't know how posh that is. The book itself is Anglophile but anti-war (war costs too much money, money symbolizing lives lost). The text is pretty jumbled, the actors speaking out of their radio personas, trying to sound wise and inoffensive at the same time. A prefatory letter from "Paul," reproduced as a frontispiece facsimile of "his" holograph letter, is particularly fatuous, being mostly about "Tender Leaf Tea," their sponsor. The portrait photograph of each actor is captioned, and again Paul takes the cake. Where Paul's face is villainously moustached, his cheeks roue' hollowed, and his eyeballs disturbingly sanpaku, the caption reads "The way out of this mess is to return to the simple fundamental principles each of us learned at his mother's knee" and Paul, get cracking.