Photographs by Berenice Abbott. Text by Henry Wysham Lanier.
New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949
Presentation copy. Presentation copy, inscribed by Abbott to her friend Marjorie C. Fairbanks: 'For Marge / With my love / Berenice'. With Fairbanks's ownership signature, brief marginal notes to two pages, and a note below the inscription: 'N.Y.C. Jan '51 - and she's right to crab about / the cover - an awful mess - the beautiful flying / deer (pg 115) would have been so much better. / Text not as bad as she said - but difficult / to read.'
Marjorie Crocker Fairbanks was born in Boston and travelled widely throughout Europe, working in Paris as a volunteer with the ambulance service to aid in relief work during the First World War. She and Berenice Abbott met in Paris in the 1920s and remained close when they returned to the United States. Fairbanks had a wide circle of friends in Paris and New York literary, artistic, and culinary circles. For a time after the Second World War, she and her son Austin managed the folk and blues singer Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), organising an ambitious world tour cut short when Lead Belly died in 1949. Abbott's portrait of him was used on the posthumous album Take This Hammer (1950).
First edition, presentation copy inscribed on the front free endpaper, with a note by the recipient below; 8vo (235 x 157 mm, 9¼ x 6¼ in); black-and-white photographs printed in gravure in 4 gatherings of 16pp, edges a little dusty; plain endpapers, black cloth-covered boards, titles to spine and upper side in yellow and green, light rubbing to extremities, photo-illustrated dust-jacket printed in green and black, spine lightly faded, light wear to edges, short tear and related crease to rear panel, near-fine in a very good dust-jacket; xi, [iii], 161, [1]pp.
New York in Photobooks pp58-61.
Marjorie Crocker Fairbanks was born in Boston and travelled widely throughout Europe, working in Paris as a volunteer with the ambulance service to aid in relief work during the First World War. She and Berenice Abbott met in Paris in the 1920s and remained close when they returned to the United States. Fairbanks had a wide circle of friends in Paris and New York literary, artistic, and culinary circles. For a time after the Second World War, she and her son Austin managed the folk and blues singer Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), organising an ambitious world tour cut short when Lead Belly died in 1949. Abbott's portrait of him was used on the posthumous album Take This Hammer (1950).
First edition, presentation copy inscribed on the front free endpaper, with a note by the recipient below; 8vo (235 x 157 mm, 9¼ x 6¼ in); black-and-white photographs printed in gravure in 4 gatherings of 16pp, edges a little dusty; plain endpapers, black cloth-covered boards, titles to spine and upper side in yellow and green, light rubbing to extremities, photo-illustrated dust-jacket printed in green and black, spine lightly faded, light wear to edges, short tear and related crease to rear panel, near-fine in a very good dust-jacket; xi, [iii], 161, [1]pp.
New York in Photobooks pp58-61.
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