Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire, 1919-1923: A nearly complete run

A nearly complete run

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New York: Egmont Arens at the Washington Square Bookshop, 1919 -20. Periodical. Small folio, pictorial wrappers.

Avante-garde art periodical devoted to the exposition of contempary literary and artistic expression. Playboywas an important magazine for many of the early artists and writers of American Modernism. It featured prose, poetry and artwork by both NY residents and artists abroad, including many original hand-pulled woodcuts and linocuts. Published at irregular intervals from January 1919 to June 1924, through nine numbers (with the 4/5 being a double number.)

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"Playboy was the aristocrat of the Greenwich Village press of the post-war era." wrote Albert Parry in his 1933 history of Bohemianism in America, Garrets and Pretenders.

Artists and writers included Ezra Pound, John Sloan, William Gropper, Arnold Genthe, Ben Hecht, Max Weber, Rockwell Kent, Vachel Lindsay Djuna Barnes, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Gauguin, Alfred Steiglitz, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, Jon Dos Passos, Boardman Robinson, Dorothy Parker, and others.

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CONDITION: Alas, not very good – however: although well-represented in institutional holdings, issues are uncommon in the trade and copies in better than Fair condition are scarce.

No. 1 – January 1919; soiled, one page detached
No. 2 – March-April 1919; soiled covers only – no text block
No. 3 – Spring 1919; Covers detached, pencil mark on front cover, cover tears, First two pages detached
No. 4-5 – Summer-Fall 1919; Covers frayed and chipped, detached
No. 6 – Winter 1919; Covers partially detached, soiled.
No. 7 – Spring 1921; Covers detached, soiled.
No. 8 (Vol. 2, No. 1) – March 1923; covers frayed, soiled.

Inquire if you would like to see more photos.

For further info, see: https://chiprowe.com/the-man-who-invented-playboy/