Details
POUND, Ezra (editor). The Inquest into the State of Contemporary English Prose--William Carlos WILLIAMS. The Great American Novel. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923.
8° (260 x 165mm). Woodcut press device on title, woodcut headband and initials. (Scattered light spotting.) Original cloth-backed boards, letterpress title label on spine, unopened (boards lightly spotted, label slightly chipped, offsetting onto free endpapers).
FIRST EDITION, NO. 262 OF 300 COPIES. The fourth title of six issued by the Three Mountains Press in a series entitled 'The Inquest into the State of Contemporary English Prose' and edited by Ezra Pound (for the first five see the previous lot and for the sixth, Hemingway's In Our Time, see lot 668). 'Although Williams describes the book in his Autobiography [...] as "a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love with a Mack truck," the book contains many sketches of other subjects, improvisations, bits of autobiography, and comments about art; it could be described as an attempt to explore, in a phrase from the book (p.47), "the background of American life"' (Wallace). Published in Paris p.405; Wallace Williams A6a; cf. Gallup Pound (1983) A23.
8° (260 x 165mm). Woodcut press device on title, woodcut headband and initials. (Scattered light spotting.) Original cloth-backed boards, letterpress title label on spine, unopened (boards lightly spotted, label slightly chipped, offsetting onto free endpapers).
FIRST EDITION, NO. 262 OF 300 COPIES. The fourth title of six issued by the Three Mountains Press in a series entitled 'The Inquest into the State of Contemporary English Prose' and edited by Ezra Pound (for the first five see the previous lot and for the sixth, Hemingway's In Our Time, see lot 668). 'Although Williams describes the book in his Autobiography [...] as "a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love with a Mack truck," the book contains many sketches of other subjects, improvisations, bits of autobiography, and comments about art; it could be described as an attempt to explore, in a phrase from the book (p.47), "the background of American life"' (Wallace). Published in Paris p.405; Wallace Williams A6a; cf. Gallup Pound (1983) A23.
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