Spring and All
Paris: Contact Publishing Company, 1923. First edition. 93 pp. Original printed wrappers. Wrappers skillfully repaired at the spine and edges, some minor soiling and light foxing. Now housed in a custom clamshell box.
Printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantiere. About 300 copies printed, “but many of these may not have been distributed,” according to the bibliographer. Williams later wrote, “Nobody ever saw it- it had no circulation at all- but I had a lot of fun with it. It consists of poems interspersed with prose... Chapter headings are printed upside down on purpose, the chapters are numbered all out of order, sometimes with a Roman numeral, sometimes with an Arabic, anything that came in handy... But the Poems were kept pure- no typographical tricks when they appear.” In his biography of Williams, Paul Mariani wrote, “most of the copies that were sent to America were simply confiscated by American customs officials as foreign stuff and therefore probably salacious and destructive of American morals. In effect, Spring and All all but disappeared as a cohesive text until its republication nearly ten years later after Williams’ death.” One of Williams’ most important books, and one of his scarcest books. It includes such iconic poems, here untitled, as “By the road to the contagious hospital;” “The pure products of America go crazy;” “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow;” and others. Wallace A7.
From the library of Victoria McAlmon, the publisher Robert McAlmon’s sister, with her signature “V. McAlmon / London 1923” on the front free endpaper. Item #2633
Price: $7,500.00