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polish, and being “driven about in a handsome car with an Italian chauffeur” into her sixties (Lear). Potter “admired her taste in sil- ver, books, and antique furniture, as well as her erudition and wide literary acquaintance”, and noted that Owen “has proved to us that Americans can be ‘educated & literary’—in fact Miss Rebaccah [ sic ] Owen—is alarming!” Owen was a devoted admirer of the work of Thomas Hardy, and his sometime friend; her Hardy collection is now held in the Thomas Hardy Collection at Colby College. Pot- ter later acquired the Belmount estate from Owen, and took on the task of clearing the house and tending to the garden after Owen’s death. Presentation copies of this work are scarce, with only three oth- ers traced at auction. This was the final unified book published in the small Peter Rabbit format. Linder, p. 430; Quinby 25; Lear, Linda, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature , Penguin, 2008. For the Owen sisters and Thomas Hardy, see Weber, Carl J., Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square , Colby College Press, 1952. £7,500 [130696] 120 RHEIMS, Bettina. Gender Studies. Göttingen: Steidl, 2014 Folio. Original white cloth, titles to spine in grey, red endpapers, CD in pa- per wallet to rear pastedown. With the dust jacket. With 38 full-page portrait photographs by Rheims. A fine copy. first edition, signed by the artist on the half-title, “Bettina Rheims, 2015, Paris”. Gender Studies is a series of portraits first ex- hibited in 2012 in Düsseldorf, intended as a continuation of Modern Lovers (1990), her examination of androgyny and transgender iden- tities, shot in the late 1980s. £300 [130721]
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that in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson asked Porter to be president of the Export-Import Bank—thus making her then the highest-ap- pointed woman in a financial position—an honour which she de- clined because of her commitment to being a columnist. “Few jour- nalists have done more to put financial news on the map than Sylvia Porter, and none has done more to advance the cause of women in this area of journalism” (John Quirt quoted in Lucht, p. 1). Lucht, Tracy, Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist , Syracuse University Press, 2013; Ware, Susan (ed.), Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 5, Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 523–5. £875 [121652] 119 POTTER, Beatrix. The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse. London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1918 Sextodecimo. Original pale green boards, titles to front cover and spine in dark green, pictorial label to front cover. Frontispiece and 26 colour illustra- tions by the author. Spine gently rolled, occasional faint marks to contents. A near-fine copy in bright boards. first edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author just a month after publication to her good friend Rebekah Owen, “For Miss Owen, with love from ‘Beatrix Potter’ Jan 14. 19”, on the front free endpaper. Owen, whom Potter described as her “eccentric old friend”, owned Belmount Hall, three miles from Potter’s Hawks- head Farm. Owen (1858–1939), originally from New York, settled in England with her sister Catherine in 1899. She cut a bold figure in the Lake District, being in the habit of wearing lipstick, pink nail
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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