BURGESS, Gelett, as James Marrion II.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Le Petit Journal des Refusées. First and only issue, created by the San Francisco humourist and critic Gelett Burgess. It is rare in commerce, and this copy notably retains the advertisement for Burgess's popular journal, The Lark, loosely inserted.Burgess modelled Le Petit Journal on the "fadzines" or "fadmagazines" that proliferated in the 1890s: "whoever could get possession of a printing press in the United States was helping to burden the news-stands with monthly rubbish, filled with cheap satire and sententious pretension". His intention was to "out-Lark The Lark" by sending out "a rollicking, whooping gabble of ultra-nonsensical verbiage, eschewing seriousness in any form" (Burgess, quoted in Drucker, p. 30).It was printed on old wallpaper in a style intended to mimic Aubrey Beardsley, and the front cover announces its subject matter as "art, literature, counterpoint, vulgar fractions, dress reform, and yachting". Purportedly the work of "feminine authoresses" (with names such as Anne Southampton Bliss, Alice Rainbird, and Howardine de Pel) who had been "ruthlessly rejected" by other editors, it lightly mocks some aspects of the feminist agenda, although Burgess letter remarked that he regretted the gendered aspect of his satire. The bold graphic design and proto-Dadaist style has seen it hailed as "the first aesthetic salvo of the modernist movement" (Evans).

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