TIMBER LINE : A Story of Bonfils and Tammen

Garden City, NY: Halcyon House, 1943. Reprint . Hardcover. Good/No Jacket. Text/Bright, clean As New. Blue linen boards/Fair; Sound w/rubs & losses to edges, marked surface rubs to back, and spine discoloration. DJ/None. PO name strike-out to fEP. The title, "Timberl Line", describes the altitude above which no tree grows. A world less trees is one handicapped & incomplete. Vividly human history of the birth of the Denver Post. In 1895 a moribund political journal fell to the hands of bartender Harry Heye Tamman (1856- 1924) and gambler/lottery-operater Frederick Gilmer Bonfils (1860 - 1933). They rename the paper and transform it into a vehicle of sensationalism. Tamman was the genius behind the paper's orientation w/slogans consciously patterned after Vaudville, while Bonfils was the aloof money man. The two were shot in the office in 1899. Both survived but to land in a sensational court case involving jury tampering. Next year, targeted again by another "disapproving" reader, they were again hospitalized. 480 pgs in 37 chapters. Chapter 23 tells of Molly Tobin Brown who, born in the eye of a cyclone, was nursed by a goat in infancy, then, at 12, saved from drowning by Mark Twain who was fishing at the same stream. Her blessings insprired the Broadway show & MGM film, "The Unsinkable Molly Brown". Gifted journalist, writer and dramatist Gene Fowler (1890 - 1960) is a superb storyteller, Portrait of a the chapter of yellow journalism during America's opening of the West.