Showcase

by Martin Dibner

For the new generation of shoppers Aintree’s had become a symbol of outmoded respectability and a faded gentility. Once one of New York’s most delectable department stores, built up to success by the magic touch of John Aintree, it still lived by the bible of ‘Aintree’s Axioms’ presented, leather bound, to each employee. To serve in the Aintree store had long given a cachet to its staff; to shop in its atmosphere of old-world courtesy had once been fashionable. Now, in the hard competition of the post-war world, it faced bankruptcy, and Casey Landis was given the job of putting it on its feet. This is the story of Casey’s tough, hard-driving fight to turn Aintree’s once more into a name to conjure with. Casey was a young man with a penchant for taking on trouble and cleaning it up, a born gambler and a shrewd merchant in the rat race of the New York garment industry. He knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it. He knew just how to fire old employees at a moment’s notice, how to treat people like puppets, how to recognize ability and set it to work for him. Most people hated him and he turned the hate to his own service. A few recognized his tremendous talent, realized what he was doing, caught his enthusiasm and pushed themselves hard to keep up with plans that turned their peaceful world into a hell-bent drive to success. A few came to love him in spite of himself.
Showcase is a novel brimming over with vitality, a story built around a brilliant interplay of personalities normally hidden from the shoppers’ view behind the display counters and the doors marked ‘Staff Only’. It will be an eye-opener to anyone who has window-shopped at a high-fashion department store, or wandered through the aisles of enticingly displayed merchandise, or fallen for the vast advertisements in the daily newspapers. But it is also a thrilling story with a heart-catching, mounting tension as old shibboleths are swept away and new ideas are dreamed up, forced into being against every kind of opposition and, finally, blossom into triumphant success—at a cost. It is the cost, in terms of human lives and the conflicts surrounding every innovation that turns Showcase into a memorable and utterly absorbing novel.

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Martin Dibner, a native of Brooklyn, attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor's degree in banking and finance. He briefly worked as a commercial artist in New York City and Miami before serving in the Navy as a gunnery officer during World War II. After the war, he did graduate work in painting and sculpture at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

For his best-known novel, "The Deep Six" (1953), set on a ship patrolling the Aleutian Islands during World War II, Mr. Dibner drew on his wartime experience. His eight other novels included "Showcase" (1958), "The Admiral" (1967) and "Ransom Run" (1977). He also wrote the text for "Seacoast Maine" (1973), a book of photographs by George Tice, and "Portrait of Paris Hill" (1990), about a village in Maine.

Mr. Dibner was the first director of the Joan Whitney Payson Gallery at Westbrook College in Portland, Me., from 1975 to 1978, and the first director of the California Arts Commission.