Coronet: A Gallery of Photographs

[No Place]: Privately Issued, 1942. Hardcover. Near Fine. First edition. Octavo. Blue cloth. Near fine with some light toning on the boards and spine. A highly uncommon, perhaps unique, collection of photographs from the pages of *Coronet* magazine. The pages, quite literally, several hundred of them bound together in hard covers with no publication information: no title page, no date (other than the dates which appear on many of the pages themselves), nothing to explain itself other than the title stamped on the spine. *Coronet*, published from 1936 through 1971 by Esquire, Inc., was conceived as a digest sized version of that sophisticated men's monthly; although it later devolved into more of a general-interest magazine. In the beginning it was strongly slanted to artistic and cultural content, including photography of which this volume provides ample evidence. The issues excerpted range from November 1937 to April 1941; not all issues are represented, nor are the pages bound in strictly chronological order. It is not completely clear whether these were actual pages taken out of issues of the magazine and assembled for binding, or whether they were reprinted specifically for this volume. The evidence, including the presence of the original page numbers, suggests the former. One clue to the volume's genesis is a personal inscription that appears on the verso of the second front endpaper, signed by a "Gene H. Ward." The name "Ward" is also stamped at the base of the spine. Together this suggests that the book was assembled by the publisher for Mr. Ward, although his ties to the magazine are unclear. Whatever its origins, it's an impressive collection mixing art and documentary photography of the period, with a distinctly international flavor. Many Americans are represented, including Dorothy Lange, Stephen Seutsch, Don Wallace, Nell Dorr, Buddy Longworth, John Gutmann, and Hélène Deutsch. There are also numerous Europeans of note including Henri-Cartier-Bressen, Brassaï, Laszlo Willinger, Ernö Vadas, André Kertész, Erwin Blumenfeld, Pierre Jahan, and André de Diènes. Every so often there will be a "portfolio" of a particular photographer's work, for example, Paul Strand and Brassaï have sections, or a collection of photos around a theme, one of which is "Easter in Jerusalem." *OCLC* locates no copies.