My collection was borne from an interest in modernist writing after I took a course in college on 20th-century literature. Of the books taught in that class—which spanned Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms to Toni Morrison’s Beloved—I gravitated toward William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Though my collection’s broader strokes cover modernist literature in general, I became fascinated by how modernist texts were published. Particularly, the relations between writers and publishers gave shape to what I began to amass. My favorite literary partnerships include Virginia Woolf’s work at the Hogarth Press with Hope Mirrlees and T. S. Eliot, along with Sylvia Beach and James Joyce’s adventures in publishing Ulysses.
Here, I have included a later printing of Ulysses signed by both Beach and Joyce; a first edition of Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker that she published with fellow modernist writer Robert McAlmon at Contact Editions; and a signed first edition of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel along with a signed letter by Maxwell Perkins.
Mina Loy Lunar Baedecker Contact Publishing Co., 1923.
McAlmon misspells the title, both on the cover and internally, which should read as Lunar Baedeker. Contact Editions, which was later rebranded from Contact Publishing Co., published Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems; Djuna Barnes’ The Ladies Almanack; and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
