Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - December - 2008 Issue
Objects of Obscure Desire from ReadInk
Jimmie Tarantino was a gossip columnist around 1950.
Here is an interesting title: Webs in the Sky, by Marjorie Roberts, from 1940. It's a novel about bridge builders, "the hardy gamblers who shake dice with death on the high narrow girders." Much of it deals with the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. Eleven of those "gamblers" who helped build that bridge lost their roll of the dice, falling to their deaths. $400.
Next is an ironically titled book for California: Valley People. Frances Marion was not writing about "Valley Girls" from Southern California. No, this was 1935, before such creatures existed. It is set in Northern California, and while fiction, likely traces many of the author's personal experiences. $600.
6 Years of Hollywood Life, published in 1952, is a compilation of mid-20th century stories and editorials from the now forgotten California gossip columnist Jimmie Tarantino. ReadInk notes, "he was (as these compiled editorials amply demonstrate) a Red-baiting sleaze-peddler of the lowest order." This was the era of the Hollywood gossip columnist, when Walter Winchell was in his prime. Tarantino managed to get himself in hot water, once being sued by a teacher for his claims of her being a Communist, another time being prosecuted for extortion for allegedly threatening to write unflattering editorials about people who did not advertise in his magazine. We don't know what happened in these cases, nor even what became of Tarantino, though his book should provide a good look at the era when McCarthyism was about to take hold. $150.
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