Apr 24, 2008 - Sale 2143

Sale 2143 - Lot 70

Price Realized: $ 9,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
RARE FIRST WORK BY BASKIN, INSCRIBED (GEHENNA PRESS.) Baskin, Leonard. On a Pyre of Withered Roses. Title-page in red & black; 10 pages printed in red, the others black, all on rectos only. 19 unnumbered leaves. 247x145 mm. Thin tall 8vo, bound into plain green pebbled cloth, spine & corners worn; title page loose, following two leaves beginning to split cleanly at gutter. [New Haven], 1942
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extremely rare first book of the gehenna press. inscribed and signed by baskin: "For Madi (?) who I hope learns to hate these poems as much as I do--Leonard Baskin V . 31 . mcmxliii." While it contains no illustrations, its typography and design is a masterwork of simplicity. This initial work was the result of the influence of the poet, artist and mystic William Blake, whose illustrated books Baskin discovered at Yale University. Its press run of only 40 copies was, like that of almost all Gehenna books, very small. Brook's 1976 Bibliography of the Gehenna Press, having seen only the title-page at Smith College and using information supplied by Dorothy King's hand list in Printing and Graphic Arts, June 1959, lists it as being printed on Old Hampshire Bank paper in an unknown ("30?") run, printed at the office in Jonathan Edwards Quadrangle, Yale University, and issued in sheets. Brook 1.
It would be 10 years before the next Gehenna publication. After serving in the United States Navy in the Pacific during the final years of World War II and working for a period in the Merchant Marine, Baskin returned to New York and earned his B.A. at the New School for Social Research in 1949. He then spent a year studying at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and another at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Only in 1951, after he returned to the States, did he resume work and publish fifty copies of A Little Book of Natural History. Baskin's own copy of On a Pyre of Withered Roses was displayed in the Library of Congress's 1995 exhibition "Caprices, Grotesques, and Homages: Leonard Baskin and the Gehenna Press." This is the first copy to appear at auction.