Dover Street Diaries: The Black Sun Press
After an overlong hibernation, my erstwhile blog has decided on a sudden to rouse and resume, in the light of the sun (which, we have learned, never sets on the Empire of the interwebs), its sporadic bibliomanic antics. So – fiat bux!
ALICE IN WONDERLAND IN PARIS
The Black Sun Press. The Black Sun Press. Rarely have I been so seduced by a publisher. I post notice of their 1930 edition of Alice in Wonderland not just because the book is strikingly beautiful inside (the impressionist illustrations by Marie Laurencin beat Dali’s for quiet weirdness) and out (the patterned paper on the binding and slipcase shows sickly red flowers festooned with spider-webs, gilt), but mainly as an excuse to tell the story of the Press’s founders, Harry and “Caresse” Crosby.
They were Americans in Paris. Her real name was Polly, née Jacobs. Back in the United States she had married a well-to-do man named Peabody, but his penchant for alcohol and arson drove her into the arms of Bostonian banking-heir, poet, bon-vivante and general heart-throb tearaway of the “Lost Generation”, Harry Crosby. They met at a picnic in 1920, had slept together within a fortnight and, until Polly’s husband agreed to a divorce in 1922, met regularly for trysts at her brassiere factory (she had, age 19, invented the backless bra). Immediately after the divorce was filed they eloped to Paris, where 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, and 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). Harry persuaded Polly to change her name to “Caresse” (though they had entertained “Clytoris” as well). Harry took a lot of cocaine and wrote very weird and forceful poems. Here, as a taster, is the close of one, “Assassin”, from his last collection:
I annihilate museums. I demolish libraries. I oblivionize skyscrapers.
I become hard as adamant strong as battleindurated with solid fire rigid with hatred.
I bring back the wizards and sorcerers the necromancers the magicians. I practice witchcraft. I set up idols. With a sharp-edged sword I cut through the crowded streets. Comets follow in my wake. Stars make obeisance to me. The moon uncovers her nakedness to me.
I am the harbinger of a New Sun World. I bring the seed of a New Copulation. I proclaim the Mad Queen.
I stamp out vast empires. I crush palaces in my rigid hands. I harden my heart against churches.
I blot out cemeteries. I feed the people with stinging nettles. I resurrect madness. I thrust my naked sword between the ribs of the world. I murder the world!
Their relationship (it may not surprise you on reading the above) did not survive the end of the decade; in 1929 Harry Crosby was found with Josephine (”The Fire Princess” of his poems, one of his many lovers), dead in the same bed, both shot in the head in what was either a suicide pact or a murder-suicide. Caresse’s life in no way diminished in drama, scandal or interest after the death of her wild husband, and she carried on the efforts of the Black Sun Press into the 1940s. Her memoir, The Passionate Years, was published in 1953 if you’re interested, which of course you should be.
This superb copy of the Black Sun Alice is one of the 50 printed on vellum, and has a fine provenance, being that of Harry F Marks, the Black Sun Press’s distributor in America. The binding is likely the publisher’s presentation binding (found on a few others copies), and was done by Whitman Bennett. We also currently stock a first edition of Caresse Crosby’s Painted Shores, 1927, an inscribed first edition of Crosby’s poetry collection Transit of Venus, 1929, and a set of the posthumous first collected edition, 1931, all three published by the Black Sun Press.
The Collected Poems. Chariot of the Sun, Sleeping Together, Torchbearer, Transit of Venus. Harry Crosby.
The Black Sun Press.
Recent Comments