Description
“BOTH VISIONARY AND DEEPLY ROOTED IN THE REAL”: LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF THE BRIDGE, ONE OF ONLY 50 COPIES SIGNED BY HART CRANE, WITH THREE WALKER EVANS PHOTOGRAVURES
CRANE, Hart and EVANS, Walker. The Bridge. Paris: Black Sun, 1930. Quarto, original flexible ivory boards, original ivory French wraps, original glassine (partial), original publisher’s slipcase. Housed in a custom clamshell box.
Signed limited first edition of this American landmark, number 19 of only 50 copies signed by Crane (from an edition of 283 copies) and printed on Japanese vellum, with three superb tissue-guarded photogravure plates after Walker Evans.
“There are certain single volumes of American poetry? which carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need. The poems are full of a primal sense of voice? urgent laments or cries from the depths where language has been held much against its will or has broken free, and now demands to be heard? This tone, so apparent in Hart Crane’s work? matches a sensibility which was both visionary and deeply rooted in the real,” especially in The Bridge, the second and last book published during Crane’s brief and tragic life (Tóibín, New York Review of Books). This first edition of only 283 copies, published in France in February 1930, memorably contains three finely screened photogravure plates after images by the poet’s close friend Walker Evans, who first met Crane in the “fall of 1928 when they were both living in Brooklyn Heights? Crane accompanied Evans on some of his photographic expeditions along the docks in Brooklyn and New York, even perhaps when he first began taking photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge” (Mellow, 69). Connolly, Modern Movement, 62. Faint trace of erasure to rear free endpaper.
Text and images fine, slight wear to spine of French wraps with some loss to spine of fragile glassine. Scarce original publisher’s slipcase disassembled. A near-fine copy of this seminal and beautiful literary work.
