Good-bye, Mr. Chips

New York, NY: Grosset and Dunlap , 1934 Grosset and Dunlap, New York. c1934. Hardcover. Reprint from original plates by arrangement with Little Brown & Company. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Very Good; bumping to head and tail; light wear to head, tail, and tips; small bleached patch at front board bottom near spine. DJ: Good+; NOT Price Clipped ($0.75); scotch tape repairs to reverse; moisture stain to head and tail; chipping and missing small pieces to rear panel at top; light wear to flap folds. Brown decorative buckram boards and spine with paste-on titles on spine and front board. Illustrated endpapers. Clean internals. Internal hinges are sound and not split.125 pp 8vo. The novella tells the story of a beloved school teacher, Mr Chipping, and his long tenure at Brookfield School, a fictional minor British boys' public boarding school located in the fictional village of Brookfield in the Fenlands. Mr Chips, as the boys call him, is conventional in his beliefs and exercises firm discipline in the classroom. His views broaden, and his pedagogical manner loosens after he marries Katherine, a young woman whom he meets on holiday in the Lake District. Katherine charms the Brookfield teachers and headmaster and quickly wins the favor of Brookfield's pupils. Their marriage is brief. She dies in childbirth and he never remarries or has another romantic interest. One of the themes of the book is that Chipping so outlasts all of his peers that his brief marriage fades into myth and few people know him as anything other than a confirmed and lonely bachelor. Despite Chipping's mediocre credentials and his view that classic Greek and Latin (his academic subjects) are dead languages, he is an effective teacher who becomes highly regarded by students and the school's governors—he has become a well-worn institution. In his later years, he develops an arch sense of humor that pleases everyone. However, he also becomes somewhat of an anachronism, with an antiquated pronunciation and is pitied for his isolation. On his deathbed, he talks of the fulfillment he felt as a teacher of boys. A clean very presentable copy in a Brodart mylar jacket.