Travelin’ Light

A Guys and Dolls matchbook bought at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. This is a hip independent bookshop, and the other matchbooks for sale were all lit-based rather than theatrical. The image on the matchbook cover is from the first edition of Damon Runyon’s short story collection Guys and Dolls (with an intro by Heywood Broun), published in 1931. The show is very loosely based on a couple of these tales and more accurately simply based on the book’s title and Runyon’s patois.
In any case, it was nice to find a matchbook with a play on it; remember when fancier matchbooks were a popular souvenir item at Broadway theater merch counters?
I just ran across a copy of Eric Bentley’s anthology From the American Drama. Bentley considered the book of Guys and Dolls impressive enough to rub shoulders in the volume with Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (a 1902 pop culture phenomenon by Clyde Fitch, later adapted for the Federal Theatre Project), The New York Idea (1906, Langdon Mitchell; this is the script recently updated by David Auburn), Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha and Saroyan’s The Man With the Heart in the Highlands (originally a short story).
The musical’s book, of course, is by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, with uncredited augmentations by the show’s original director, George S. Kaufman.
Well matched!