Themes in My Poems

San Francisco: The Book Club of California, printed and decorated with woodcuts by Mallette Dean, 1956. Limited Edition. Hardcover. Fine/very good +. Dean, Mallette. One of 350 copies, quarto size, 58 pp., with prospectus. The only published prose work by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), with a preface by Professor B. H. Lehman, who had also introduced the Book Club of California's earlier, 1928 work of Jeffers, entitled simply "Poems", this volume is the transcript of a lecture Jeffers gave at the Library of Congress in 1941; it was one of the few times Jeffers could be persuaded to read and talk about his poetry, and the lecture demonstrates the force and depth behind one of California's finest poets.

Mallette Dean (1907-1975), in addition to printing the book, illustrates the book with his stunning woodcuts; a printer and muralist, Dean was one of twenty-six artists commissioned to paint murals in San Francisco's Coit Tower, and he illustrated books for the Grabhorn Press for fifteen years. This volume was included in the Exhibition of Western Books (Rounce & Coffin Club), and was both printed and illustrated by Dean.

___DESCRIPTION: Quarter brown cloth with decorated paper boards in blue-green, brown, and black which were printed in relief from a plaster block, blue paper label with black lettering on the spine, fore-edge uncut, title page and colophon in black and red, woodcut initials and one rule in red, six woodcut illustrations which were coloured by linocut tint blocks (including those on title page and colophon) by Mallette Dean throughout; handset French Old Style type, machine-made paper, quarto size (11.25" by 8.5"), pagination: [i-iv] v-ix [1-2] 3-46 [1 colophon], one of 350 copies, unnumbered. In a brown paper dust wrapper. With prospectus, one sheet folded once to make four pages, printed in red and black, reproduces the title page illustration and includes a woodcut initial.

___CONDITION: A fine copy, with clean boards, straight corners with no rubbing, a strong, square text block with solid hinges, the interior is clean and bright, and entirely free of prior owner markings; light toning to the fore-edge of the text block, a few spots of foxing to the margins of a couple pages, endpapers with very light foxing and toning. The dust wrapper is very good plus, unclipped, clean, with light edge wear, small chips to the corner and one small spot at the bottom of the spine, title written in pen by a prior owner on the spine. Prospectus is near fine, clean, without wear but for shallow creases at the bottom margin, light toning to the edges.

___CITATION: BCC no. 93; Hawk no. 340.

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