COBURN'S RAREST BOOK - WITH SIX ORIGINAL PLATINUM PRINTS - INSCRIBED TO HENRY JAMES

The Cloud. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. With photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Los Angeles: C.C. Parker, 1912. Coburn, Alvin Langdon. First edition. Quarto, 9 1/2 x 13 inches. [31] p. (on double leaves), [6] leaves of plates. Number 28 of an intended but not completed edition of 60 copies, signed by Coburn. The book contains six original 7 x 5 inch platinum prints, printed by Coburn himself. Text printed in brown ink on french-folded sheets of Strathmore Japan paper. Original canvas backed boards, paper label on front cover. Marginal dampstaining on the first few pages does not affect any text or image. In the rare original heavy paper dust jacket, printed on the front only, expertly restored. The only book of Coburn's illustrated with original prints. OCLC locates only five copies. Goldschmidt, The Truthful Lens, 148.

Inscribed on the colophon "To Henry James with best wishes from Alvin Langdon Coburn 2. VIII. 1912". James responded to the gift, in a letter written on August 18, saying the clouds are very artful and beautiful, and the publication most elegant and charming. Coburn, he said, has combined photography remarkably with aviation. A couple of his pictures, James believed, could have been taken only from an "aeroplane." Coburn was James's preferred photographer and James commissioned him to provide the 24 frontispiece photographs for James's Collected Works (the New York Edition,published 1906-7. Coburn devotes a chapter of his autobiography to that collaboration. Item #29480

Coburn arranged for publication of "The Cloud" at the time of his exhibition of 50 California photographs at the Blanchard Gallery in Los Angeles. He was an acknowledged master of the gum-platinum print technique, of which he wrote "In the gum-platinum process the first step was to make a platinum print, which could be either in the normal silver grey colour, or toned to a rich brown by the addition of mercury to the developer. The finished print was then coated with a thin layer of gum-bichromate containing pigment of the desired colour. I found Vandyke brown especially suitable owing to its transparency, and by having the underlying platinum print in the grey, a very pleasant two-colour effect was produced. The bichromated print was replaced behind the original negative, great care being taken to get it accurately in register. It was then re-exposed and developed in the usual way. It was in the nature of platinum prints that the shadows were somewhat weak; by superimposing a gum image they were intensified. The whole process added a lustre to the platinum base comparable to the application of varnish, at the same time preserving the delicacy of the highlights in the platinum print.” Coburn, p. 18. Coburn wrote "Clouds are especially good subject matter for the photographer.... The patterns of moving clouds and water are never the same from now to all eternity, and these patterns are ever moving to our continual delight. I have made hundreds of photographs of clouds and never tire of them. Once I made a little book illustrating Shelley's Ode 'The Cloud' with six original platinum prints. Only sixty copies were to be printed and even all these were not made. I only know of one surviving copy in addition to my own, so this is doubtless my rarest book!" Alvin Langdon Coburn Photographer. An Autobiography (Gernsheim ed., Dover, 1978), p. 46.John Szarkowski wrote in "Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art" (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973): "Clouds were a particularly good subject for an artist like Coburn who sought the broad poetic view of things. Granted that no two clouds are the same; nevertheless, their meanings (except to farmers and meteorologists) were sufficiently imprecise and generalized to allow Coburn to use them as abstract visual elements. Coburn used the skies as children and poets use them, and as Leonardo used stained old walls: as an analogue model of imaginary worlds"

Price: $75,000.00

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