WILLIAMS, William Carlos.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Wedge. First edition, one of 380 copies. Williams published the book in response to requests by American servicemen for a pocket-size collection to carry with them during the Second World War. Due to wartime shortages, several major publishers declined to publish The Wedge, which was eventually picked up by Henry Duncan and Wightman Williams at the Cummington Press, who set the poems by hand in Centaur and Arrighi types, printed them on Dacian paper, and surreptitiously bound the sheets on the premises and at the expense of one of the publishers who had rejected it. The poems anticipate Williams's epic poem Paterson (1946-58).

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