INSCRIBED ON HALLOWEEN

White Buildings.; Foreword by Allen Tate

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. First edition. 8vo, cloth-backed decorative boards. Spine stamping dulled, tips somewhat rubbed, otherwise near fine in a custom quarter-morocco slipcase. First edition of Crane’s first book, one of 500 copies printed, the second issue with the corrected title page spelling Allen Tate’s name correctly tipped in as a cancel. A significant association copy, inscribed by Crane on the front flyleaf: “For Nathan Asch | with best wishes, | Hart Crane, | 10/31/27” and additionally signed beneath that inscription by Allen Tate. Above Crane’s inscription is a small circular ink spot where his pen evidently leaked as he began to write his inscription. A novelist and storyteller – and the son of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Asch -- Nathan Asch was a fixture in the community of American expatriates in Paris, a close friend of Ernest Hemingway and, for a short but intense time, of Hart Crane. At the time of this inscription, Crane and Asch had only recently met, when they were tenants in the same Patterson, New York house belonging to Mrs. Turner, where Tate and Caroline Gordon had also resided, with the Cowleys and Josephsons nearby. It is especially noteworthy that this copy is signed by both Crane and Tate – perhaps the only such copy. A fine relic of Crane’s time in Patterson, two weeks before his trip to California. [Schwartz & Schweik A 1.1]. Item #32552

Price: $25,000.00

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