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Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
EARLY HANDMADE BRUCE ROGERS BOOK ROGERS, BRUCE. Manuscript gift book titled "October Song." 2 watercolors Signed A. B. Rogers and verse by poet Evaleen Stein. Printed in red and black with decorated initials. 8vo, hand-lettered wrappers string-tied with tassels, chipped and browned along edges, heavily dampstained along bottom margin; affects endpapers and, more lightly, margins of contents. Lafayette, Indiana, 1890
unique early handmade book by twenty-year-old rogers. In 1890 Rogers was a senior at Purdue University studying art. That Autumn, he and good friend Evaleen Stein, who is considered Indiana's first nature poet, also from Lafayette, created this booklet as a birthday gift for mutual friend Martha Ward. It contains Stein's poem "October Song" and two watercolors by Rogers, one in colors, the other in grey and blue wash. The two collaborated on future projects as well. Recorded but not located is his first such book created at the age of fifteen. It is a copy of William Cullen Bryant's "Woodland Hymn" entirely calligraphed and illustrated by Rogers. October Song may therefore be among the earliest existing pieces by the famous designer and typographer who is best known for his Oxford Lectern Bible and his masterly Centaur Type created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work shows his maturing sense of design, space, and decoration as well as a clear understanding of the book as a work of art.
