CROSBY, Harry.

£2,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Collected Poems. First edition, first printing, of the first collected poems of Harry Crosby, a commemorative production following his death in December 1929. This copy is out-of-series from a limited issue of 500 copies on Navarre paper (watermarked "Lafuma"). The colophon calls for further copies on Japanese Vellum and Holland Paper, but Minkoff writes that no copies are known, and probably never existed. Harry Crosby (1898-1929) was born the heir to one of Boston's wealthiest banking families, but after serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War he abandoned his wealth to live as an author in Paris with his wife Caresse. They embedded themselves in the avant-garde cultural scene, befriending the likes of Dali, Hemingway and Cartier-Bresson, founded the Black Sun Press which helped to publish the early works of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane. They lived a life of utter dissolution off Harry's inheritance which, when it ran out, had to be supplemented by telegrams to his banker father such as the infamous, "PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LIVE A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE", (to which the father, reluctantly but nonetheless amazingly, assented). Caresse continued to publish works by the Black Sun Press after her husband's suicide in 1929, including the present set.

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