Last week, on a bright, blustery Baltimore morning, Joseph Harrison rang the doorbell at 32 W 25th Street, and we entered Royal Books. Specializing in first editions, the store is a book fetishist’s dream come true. Though it’s only a mile away from my home, I hadn’t visited Royal Books before, nor had I heard of it; I’ve lived in Baltimore for a year and a half, but I’m still discovering so much about the city. Joe has lived in Baltimore for decades, and I was eager to take his personal tour of Baltimore. I knew I could anticipate Faidley’s Seafood in Lexington Market, but I wasn’t sure where else we were headed. As Joe is a poet (the author of three collections, most recently Shakespeare’s Horse) and the American editor of Waywiser Press, I hoped there might be some poetry involved. Royal Books was our first stop, and it did not disappoint — I met a book there. I say “I met” because the sensation was something like a romantic encounter. I met a first edition publication of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Esthétique Du Mal.”
I knew the poem itself, but I hadn’t known that the poem had made three debuts — first in the Autumn 1944 issue of the Kenyon Review (discussed in my previous blog post):
later in the 1947 collection Transport to Summer:
and in between, in 1945, published as a small volume of its own:
This small volume was the one placed in my hands at Royal Books. It is a physically beautiful object, made more precious, as first editions are, through its rarity and the passage of time.
This physical incarnation of Esthétique Du Mal was hand printed by the Cummington Press; “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” another important long poem included in Transport to Summer, was also published first by the Cummington Press as a stand-alone work in 1942. The Press was founded by Harry Duncan in 1939 as part of the Cummington School of the Arts in Cummington, Massachusetts. In the introduction to the “Wallace Stevens – Cummington Press Correspondence, 1941-1951,” Carolyn Masel writes:
The Press itself was part of The Cummington School of the Arts for gifted children. Pupils enrolled as students of the Press were actively involved with the printing of publications. While it was never envisaged that The Press would make a substantial profit, it was hoped that it would eventually be able to repay $1500 to the fund that had set it up . . . Stevens was, at one point, invited to become a Trustee of the School, but declined the offer.
Katherine Frazier, the Director of the School and the Manager of the Press, first solicited a manuscript from Stevens, but due to health issues (a series of heart attacks), printer Harry Duncan took over her managerial position. Despite numerous invitations to visit the Press, Stevens never met Duncan or Frazier in person.
Attention to detail is evident in every aspect of the physical book. Abstract illustrations appear throughout the volume, hand-colored by the Press’s illustrator Paul Wightman Williams; Williams hand-colored every one of the forty copies in the signed edition of Esthétique Du Mal. Williams’s drawings were actually the catalyst for publication; Masel writes:
In February 1945 Duncan wrote Stevens to say that he was sending him some drawings by Paul Wightman Williams which were inspired by Esthétique Du Mal, one drawing for each poem [section]. If Stevens liked them, Duncan hoped to print them. Stevens did indeed like the drawings, pronouncing them ‘extraordinary’ . . . The poem was set from the text of The Kenyon Review. 300 ordinary copies were printed, plus forty special signed copies. Both Stevens and Williams waived royalty fees [which Stevens had done for Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction as well], which allowed Duncan to purchase some Italian paper for the project (‘the most lavish investment in paper we’ve yet made’).
The American Institute of Graphic Arts selected the unsigned edition of Esthétique Du Mal as one of Fifty Books of 1946, displaying it in exhibitions in New York and Boston.
Holding the book in my hands, carefully turning its thick, creamy pages, I felt a little over two sevenths of the deadly sins — lust, greed, and a touch of envy. What once cost $12.50, now costs $18,500.00.
If you are in Baltimore, visit Royal Books to commune with Esthétique Du Mal yourself, along with other Stevens first editions like Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (Cummington Press, 1942), Three Academic Pieces (Cummington Press, 1947), and Harmonium (Knopf, 1923). Other gems include a gorgeous version of Frank Stanford’s The Singing Knives (Lost Roads Press, 1979 — $400) and an inscribed first edition of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (Wuntemaum Press, 1964 — $45,000).
The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore also have one of the 300 “‘ordinary’ iterations” of the volume.
Read more about the Cummington Press in Mary L. Richmond’s November 1967 piece in Books at Iowa, reprinted online by the University of Iowa Libraries; if you’re in Iowa City, visit some Cummington Press publications in the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, including Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and a binder’s copy of Esthétique Du Mal; Duncan eventually moved his press to Iowa when he accepted an invitation to teach typography in the University of Iowa School of Journalism. This was a kind of homecoming for Duncan, who was born in Keokuk, Iowa. Read Duncan’s 1997 obituary in The New York Times here.
Paul Wightman Williams died an untimely death in a car accident in 1956. I thought I’d be able to find digital images of his hand-colored Esthétique Du Mal drawings online for this post, but I cannot. I think this means another trip to Royal Books is in my immediate future.