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quaintances, including Romaine Brookes, Janet Flanner, Elisabeth de Gramont, Radclyffe Hall, Mina Loy, Solita Solano, Lady Trou- bridge, and Dolly Wilde. As is common in some copies of this edition, the imprint on the title page has been blacked out. According to Barnes’s biographer Phillip Herring, the Parisian bookseller Edward Titus “persuaded Barnes to put his name on the title page of Ladies Almanack , as if he were the publisher, in exchange for selling the book in his shop”. However he asked for “a large cut of the royalties in addition to the retail mark-up which infuriated Barnes and reinforced her disillu- sionment with the book trade” (pp. 152–3). Barnes subsequently had his name removed from many copies. See Herring, Phillip, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes , Viking, 1995. £1,750 [127242] 18 BARNES, Djuna. Nightwood. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1936 Octavo. Original purple cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge stained purple. With the dust jacket. With a printed green card Faber and Faber Ltd order form laid in. Spine rolled, ends slightly bruised, else an excellent copy in the lightly soiled jacket, one closed tear to foot of spine panel (20 mm) and some chips to head of spine and top edge. first edition, scarce in the dust jacket, of Barnes’s masterpiece. “Highly charged . . . linguistically complex, and riven with pain and loss. It centres on the anguished narratives of Matthew O’Connor, a transvestite gynaecologist, and Nora Flood, who is in love with the enigmatic and boyish woman Robin Vote”, and is considered to have “one of the most shattering endings in modern literature. It took years for Barnes to find a publisher, until [her friend Emily] Coleman pressured T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber to accept it. Eliot, who wrote the preface, thought it was like an Elizabethan tragedy for its ‘quality of horror and doom’” ( ODNB ). It is considered one of the most important gay novels of the first half of the 20th century in the English language (Slide). See Slide, Anthony, Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide , Routledge, 2011. £1,350 [131418]
Decidedly uncommon: no copy listed by Copac; OCLC locates just six copies internationally. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image , Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 2007. £1,250 [131543] 17 [BARNES, Djuna.] Ladies Almanack. Paris: printed for the author, and sold by Edward W. Titus, 1928 Small quarto. Original cream card wrappers with woodcut-style illustration to front and rear wrapper. With 22 woodcut-style illustrations by Barnes in the text. Spine chipped with some loss to spine ends, covers lightly dust soiled with a few spots, occasional spotting to preliminaries. A very good copy. first edition, limited issue, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: “To Madge Garland With love—Djuna Barnes Paris—1932”. The recipient, Madge Garland (1898–1990), was a pioneering fashion journalist and teacher who had a major influence on the British fashion scene throughout the mid-20th century. In 1922 Garland started working at Vogue under Dorothy Todd, and introduced Cecil Beaton’s work to the magazine in 1927. She developed friendships with many of the Bloomsbury and bohemian intellectuals that Todd recruited for Vogue , includ- ing Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Rebecca West, and Vita-Sackville West. Garland and Barnes likely first met during this time, as Barnes was working as a journalist and interviewed many of the major fashion icons of the day, including the French couturiers Jenny and Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel. Both women were also involved in the lesbian social circles of the 1920s avant-garde and were rumoured to have been lovers. After a short hiatus working as a freelance writer for New York’s influential Women’s Wear Daily and the women’s section of the Illustrated London News , Garland rejoined Vogue in 1932, the year of this inscription, as fashion editor. The present work is a privately printed and distributed pseudon- ymous satirical novel: this is number 45 of 1,000 copies on Alfa, from a total edition of 1,050. Barnes based her story on the lesbian social circle at Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon in Paris, and many of the the characters that are pseudonymous portraits of notable ac-
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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