The Sandburg Range

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957. Hardcover. Small 4to. Grey cloth with black lettering, pictorial dust jacket. xvii, 459pp. Illustrations. Near fine/very good. Jacket a bit edgeworn. A tight and nice first edition of this compilation of Sandburg's poetry and prose. As jacket front panel notes, this is "The first representative selection from his entire work" and shows "The vibrant, mighty sweep of the great American writer renowned as poet, Lincoln biographer, historian, novelist, troubador, autobiographer, and storyteller for children." Published without frontispiece, this special copy has been extra-illustrated with an unsigned Autograph Document (pencil) tipped opposite the title page, 1p, 3" X 5", n.p., n.y. Very good. Intriguing if cryptic 7-item list boldly pencilled in Sandburg's large, distinctive script, reading in full (verbatim): "classcl / free verse / imagists / spectrics / speckwood / metaphyscsts / superrealists." Whether Sandburg used this scrap later in a book or article is unknown and its context and meaning challenging to reconstruct at this point. Two-punched along top. He was well known for filling his pockets with all kinds of notes he would pencil to himself: Things to do, odd turns of phrase he liked, ideas for poems -- anything and everything that struck his fancy in some way. These chits rarely survived and few turn up -- he gave this example to good friend Ralph G. Newman (1912-2000), founder of Chicago's noted Abraham Lincoln Book Shop.