Nursing the Thorne Smith Triplets

The second of the three omnibus editions of his work to appear, the Thorne Smith Triplets pulled together the wonderful novels Topper Takes A Trip, The Night Life of the Gods, and The Bishop's Jaegers in one large, affordable edition.

Subtitled: Three Hilarious Hellions Under One Cover, this voluptuous package was first published in hardcover by Doubleday, Doran and Company in 1938. Later editions were re-published by the Literary Guild and the Sun Dial Press. The Sun Dial Press versions are the ones you'll most likely find in your forays into used bookstores and online hunting.

The cover art is particularly notable if you're aware of the story about Thorne as an infant being mislaid by his drunken nursemaid at a railroad station in Baltimore.

The dust jacket shows a strikingly sexy nurse-maid pushing a baby stroller containing the three books: Topper Takes A Trip, The Night Life of the Gods, and The Bishop's Jaegers. We're uncertain if she is "in a state of faintly alcoholic abstraction".

Here's a glimpse of the the details below.

You can often nip copies of this nice collection at rather affordable prices on Amazon or Ebay but usually without the dust jacket featuring this saucy artwork.