Egypt, Maine — a mill town — goes broke when the bank fails, and a scheme to print local currency, a mill owner, and a young man with nothing to lose take it from there. Day was a Maine newspaperman whose books are full of loggers, river drivers and small-town politicians; the title is the joke, and the economics of a one-industry town in the 1920s are exact enough to be read as history. Fifty-nine plates by painters including George Bellows and Thomas Fearnley carry the mill dam, the frozen river and the emptied factory through the same hard winter the town lives.
