STEIN, Gertrude.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Lucy Church Amiably. First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author upside down on the rear free endpaper, "To Charlotte Becker, whom I very well remember and who was so pleasant and amused in those early days, Gertrude Stein". Becker was a prolific poet, playwright, and illustrator, who later became a book reviewer for the Buffalo Evening News.Becker and Stein were introduced by their mutual friend Mabel Dodge Luhan in Paris in spring 1911. Luhan was a wealthy and influential advocate for Stein in the USA, and Becker's sometime lover. Lucy Church Amiably was the first title in Stein's Plain Editions series, published by her and her partner Alice B. Toklas after Stein had grown frustrated with finding a publisher for the title. Stein wanted the book "to look like a school book and to be bound in blue" (Stein, p. 298), and records the "childish delight amounting to ecstasy" seeing it in the windows of bookstores gave her in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: "She had never seen a book of hers in a bookstore window before... and she spent all her time in wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy Church Amiably in the windows" (ibid., p. 229).

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