Grosset & Dunlap

Savvy publishers understood that viewers often wanted to read the narration and dialogue only implied on the screen.

The firm Grosset & Dunlap quickly cornered the market on Photo-Play Editions by reprinting literary texts alongside stills from their film adaptations and packaging them in attractive new dust jackets.

The cover of Grosset & Dunlap's nineteen twenty-six edition of Moby-Dick explicitly advertised its connection to The Sea Beast, even featuring a signed picture of John Barrymore as Ahab.

The text itself is Melville's novel; no Derick, no love interest, no happy ending.

But the accompanying photographs suggest that readers should also be aware of the movie's plot.

Thus, the publisher concluded the film's addition of a lost sweetheart and a perfidious brother was not presumptuous meddling, but rather a laudable act of critical explanation, a means of making Ahab's madness more believable.

Problem solved.

Grosset & Dunlap Photo-Play Edition, left; Reader's Library Novelization, center; Big Little Book Easy Reader.

Shocking.

It looked more like a clown, but I remembered that Grosset and Dunlap, obviously, formerly issued very cheap editions of classics by Alexandra Dumas and Victor Hugo.

The volume I had was The Man Who Laughs, which is kind of a famous reference photo for Joker.

Mm-hmm.