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15 BAKER, Joséphine. Les mémoires. Recueillis et adaptés par Marcel Sauvage. Avec 30 dessins inédits de Paul Colin. Paris: KRA, 1927 Octavo (182 × 112 mm). Contemporary art deco brown and white geomet- rically patterned boards, dark brown calf label, fore and bottom edge un- trimmed, red cloth page marker. Original printed wrappers bound in. With 30 illustrations by Paul Colin. Partially erased pencilled ownership inscrip- tion to head of front free endpaper. Negligible rubbing to spine ends and tips, contents toned as often; a near-fine copy. first trade edition, a superb presentation copy, inscribed by Baker and Sauvage on the blank before the half-title, “a Pierre Lagarde son ami Marcel Sauvage” and “From Joséphine Baker July 13/27 Paris”; subsequently by the artist on the half-title, “á Jacques Baril á l’amateur d’art á l’ami Paul Colin”. The first recipient, Pierre Lagarde (1903–1959), was a writer and journalist, winner of the 1944 Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française for his novel Valmaurie . This copy may have been inscribed at the launch party when Baker “invited friends for a glass of cham- pagne to celebrate the publication of the little volume. She greeted guests, signed books, spilled ink on one of her publisher’s shoes. Many people praised Marcel Sauvage’s artistry—‘It is a book of poems for which Joséphine is the Muse’—and the painter Maurice de Vlaminck admired every word. ‘She dances, eats what she likes, and ignores immorality. Life to her is an apple she bites with all her teeth’” (Baker & Chase, p. 148).
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Paul Colin’s presentation, to the writer on dance, Jacques Baril (1924–1984), author of Dictionnaire de danse (1964) and La danse moderne (1977), was almost certainly made some years later. In his memoirs Colin remembers his first sight of Baker: “naked but for green feath- ers about her hips, her skull lacquered black, she provoked both anger and enthusiasm . . . I still see her, frenzied, undulating, moved by the saxophones’ wail. Did her South Carolina dances foretell the era of a new civilisation, finally relieved of fetters centuries old?” (Colin, p. 74). Baker, Jean-Claude & Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart , Cooper Square Press, 2001; Colin, Paul, La Croûte: souvenirs , Editions de la Table Ronde, 1957. £1,650 [130852] 16 BAKER, Joséphine; Felix Achille de la Cámara; Pepito Abatino. Mon sang dans tes veines. Paris: Les editions Isis, 1931 Octavo “en carré”. Original white illustrated wrappers, titles in white, red, and black on pink ground over black and red portrait of Baker. With the glassine jacket. Portrait of Joséphine and 5 half-tone plates, decorated ini- tials, all by Georges de Pogédaïeff. Slight creasing and nicks to faintly foxed exposed fore edge; else a near-fine copy. first and limited edition, number 73 of 250 copies printed on vergé baroque paper. In the novella, “Joséphine devises the char- acter of Joan (also called Jo), a young mulatto girl whose mother is the maid in the home of a Boston millionaire, Ira Cushman Barclay, and his son, Fred. Joan selflessly saves Fred’s life through a blood transfusion. The primal Baker and the new saintly image meld in Mon sang dans tes veines . Baker continued to develop this image as part of her humanitarian self-sacrifice in World War II and in the domestic experiment with her adopted Rainbow Tribe at Les Mi- landes” (Jules-Rosette, p. 4). The attractive art deco illustrations are by the Russian painter, illustrator and theatre designer Georges Anatolyevich Pogédaieff (1894–1971), resident in Paris from 1925.
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