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for work inculcates personhood, identity, and a sense of usefulness” ( OEAL , p. 109). Octavo. Original illustrated paper over boards, cream endpapers, top edge trimmed, others untrimmed. Slight wear to spine ends and tips, spine and extremities rubbed, occasional light foxing to contents. A very good, bright copy of this fragile publication. ¶ Jay Parini & Phillip W. Leininger eds., Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature , Vol. 1, 2003. £15,000 [152394] 83 GINSBERG, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. New York: City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956 LAUNCHING THE BEAT GENERATION First published edition, with the spelling “Lucien Carr” in the dedication, and the eighth line of the second paragraph on the rear cover beginning “Harlem”. Howl and Other Poems was a landmark collection, considered one of the principal works of literature that launched the Beat Generation. It was Ginsberg’s first regularly published book, and was printed in a run of an estimated 1,500 copies. Duodecimo. Original stiff black wrappers, stapled as issued, with a white hand-pasted wraparound paper label printed in black. Some minor soiling around spine fold and a few trivial marks to rear cover, but an unusually fresh copy, sound, and clean within, generally in excellent condition. £3,500 [152171]
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82 GILMAN, Charlotte Perkins, as Charlotte Perkins Stetson. The Yellow Wall Paper. Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1901 RARE SIGNED COPY Second edition, inscribed by the author on the half- title, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman Feb. 1903”. Signed copies of this highly influential and important early feminist work are rare. First published in 1899 in book form, Gilman’s semi-autobiographical short story explored the psychological pain inflicted on women from gender inequality, the limitation of women to domestic roles, and the denial of intellectually stimulating work. The story, presented in the first person through a series of journal entries, is of a woman suffering
from postpartum depression, but diagnosed by her physician husband, who does not believe she is “truly sick”, as having a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” – a common diagnosis for women in that period. The narrator’s treatment is to be shut up in the yellow-wallpapered nursery. Forbidden to work, denied the freedom to write, and deprived of stimulation, she escapes into psychosis, obsessing over the pattern and colour of the wallpaper. “Unlike most nineteenth-century feminists, who believed that universal suffrage would heal the world’s woes and correct gender imbalance and injustice, Gilman argued that woman’s economic dependence on man was at the root of her servitude and her excessively sexualized and limited social role. All human beings, she posits in Women and Economics , both male and female, must have some worthy work,
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SPRING 2022
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