JENISON, Madge.

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling. First edition, inscribed by a former employee on the front free endpaper: "To my family, as a souvenir of my seven months in the Sunwise Turn. Helen". The Sunwise Turn was one of the first female-owned book shops in America. It also served as a literary salon patronized by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Peggy Guggenheim, amongst others. Jenison's memoir of her time at the helm of the Sunwise Turn went through two further printings in 1923, a testament to the shop's cultural resonance. It was intended as a "bookshop of a different kind" (pp. 3-4) that offered the customer "a breath of experience even to buy a book there" (p. 43). The stock was intellectual and international, and the premises were curated to "look like a place in which you could read a book" (p. 16). When the store opened in April 1916, Publisher's Weekly described it as "visionary... quaint and bewitching" suggesting "something old-worldly, yet startlingly new" (Publisher's Weekly, p. 1361). Alongside bookselling, the shop also hosted literary talks, published broadsides and exhibited art. Many women interested in the profession interned in the shop, including Peggy Guggenheim, who credited it with inspiring her love of collecting.

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.