A sharp first printing inscribed "For Steve!" with a small drawing signed by Deitch and dated 5/2003.

Laid in is a flyer for Deitch's 2003 book signing at Comic Relief book store in Berkeley.

A complete collection of the Academy Award-winning animator and cartoonist's covers and cartoons for Record Changer magazine from the 1940s and 50s.

Out of print.

From the publisher:

A visual feast of swingin' cartoons for jazz lovers. On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical,scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard to find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the 40s was called a cat (as in cool cat), derived from the West African word "Katta", a human), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for the Record Changer titled " The Cat" ,which quickly became a fixture at the magazine.

He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with the "The Cat". Deitch stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of jazz and became a visual paean to the joy of collecting and appreciating jazz.

From the dustjacket:

The Cat on the Hot Thin Groove collects all of Gene Deitch's art that appeared in The Record Changer, the jazz magazine devoted to traditional jazz fans in the 1940s and '50s.

Included are all of Deitch's covers that graced the magazine from 1945 to 1950, which display Deitch's stylistic and graphic virtuosity, as well as his gorgeous black-and-white cartoon panels starring the CAT, Deitch's loving send-up of the purist jazz aficionado, a category in which he cheerfully includes himself: "It was a fanatic's world, and I was one of the fanatics."