Bishop, Elizabeth

The Collected Prose with: Ephemera

New York, NY, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. First Edition. “Every time I see long columns of numbers, handwritten in a certain way, a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful, goes through my diaphragm. It is like seeing the dorsal fin of a large fish suddenly cut through the surface of the water – not a frightening fish like a shark, more like a sailfish. The numbers have to be only up to but under a hundred, rather large and clumsily written, and the columns squeezed together, with long vertical lines between them, drawn by hand, long and crooked. They are usually in pencil, these numbers that affect me so, but I’ve seen them in blue crayon or blurred ink, and they produce the same effect. One morning our newspaper delivery man, an old Italian named Tony, whom I’d seen over and over again, threw back the pages of his limp, black, oilcloth-covered account book to my page, and there, up and down, at right angles to the pages’ blue lines, he had kept track of my newspapers in pencil, in columns of ones and ones, twos and threes. My diaphragm contracted and froze.” (Elizabeth Bishop, Primer Class, p. 3) A collection of the prose work of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet & short story writer, among the most popular & beloved in the twentieth-century American canon. Edited by Robert Giroux, the famous book editor who became a partner at, and then chairman of Farrar & Straus. “The book reflects the author’s lifelong devotion to questions of memory and travel. As a companion volume to The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, it reinforces James Merrill’s conclusion that Elizabeth Bishop is ‘our greatest national treasure.’” (from back flap) Hardcover in unclipped dust. First Edition, First Printing, as explicated at copyright page. From the collection of Laurence Goldstein (1943-2023), poet, editor, and professor in the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature. Retained and included is a chapter of Bishop’s poetry from an unknown collection, complete with Goldstein’s extensive notes and marginalia in blue ink. Book in Very Fine condition with very faint scratching and rubbing to front, back covers; otherwise substantially mint both inside and out. Dust jacket Fine with light rubbing and scratching to front, back covers & spine; some tiny bumps & creases to edges & corners of same; age-toning to interior edges & corners of same and along inside flaps. Very Fine / Fine. [Item #8245]

Price: $60.00