Gertrude Stein, Lucy Church Amiably, Plain Editions, Paris, 1930 (First Edition)
Title: Lucy Church Amiably
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Plain Editions, Paris
Publication date: 1930 First Edition
Format: Hardback. Original publisher's ink blue cloth, lettered black on spine and on front cover. At head of title: 'A novel of romantic beauty and nature and which looks like an engraving.'
Pages: 240
Book Condition: Tiny label on rear pastedown of Brentano's Paris. Printed price on rear board 'Three Dollars.' Spine tanned, hinges somewhat rubbed and very slightly cracked but holding well with some slight spotting to covers and some slight staining to front top edge.
Lucy Church Amiably is a modernist text, written in the summer of 1927 when Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas spent the summer in a house in the French countryside near the Rhone. First published in 1930 it was the initial offering of Plain Editions, the press that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein created for the sake of publishing Stein’s work after Stein had grown frustrated with finding a publisher.
The book is notable for its celebration of the waterfall beside which much of it was written. It is also noted for its design and electric indigo cover which mimicked the design of school student’s copy books at the time, a decision which Stein saw as raising the book from the level of a novel to the level of the book-object. Stein typically used notebooks as the measure of her compositions, adjusting her writing to fit the blank, bound space. She often worked with groups of copybooks, filling in the pre-printed blanks with private names she and Toklas gave each other.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein writes that she wanted the book "to look like a school book and to be bound in blue", and records the "childish delight amounting to ecstasy" seeing it in the windows of bookstores. "She had never seen a book of hers in a bookstore window before... and she spent all her time in wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy Church Amiably in the windows".
Title: Lucy Church Amiably
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Plain Editions, Paris
Publication date: 1930 First Edition
Format: Hardback. Original publisher's ink blue cloth, lettered black on spine and on front cover. At head of title: 'A novel of romantic beauty and nature and which looks like an engraving.'
Pages: 240
Book Condition: Tiny label on rear pastedown of Brentano's Paris. Printed price on rear board 'Three Dollars.' Spine tanned, hinges somewhat rubbed and very slightly cracked but holding well with some slight spotting to covers and some slight staining to front top edge.
Lucy Church Amiably is a modernist text, written in the summer of 1927 when Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas spent the summer in a house in the French countryside near the Rhone. First published in 1930 it was the initial offering of Plain Editions, the press that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein created for the sake of publishing Stein’s work after Stein had grown frustrated with finding a publisher.
The book is notable for its celebration of the waterfall beside which much of it was written. It is also noted for its design and electric indigo cover which mimicked the design of school student’s copy books at the time, a decision which Stein saw as raising the book from the level of a novel to the level of the book-object. Stein typically used notebooks as the measure of her compositions, adjusting her writing to fit the blank, bound space. She often worked with groups of copybooks, filling in the pre-printed blanks with private names she and Toklas gave each other.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein writes that she wanted the book "to look like a school book and to be bound in blue", and records the "childish delight amounting to ecstasy" seeing it in the windows of bookstores. "She had never seen a book of hers in a bookstore window before... and she spent all her time in wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy Church Amiably in the windows".
Title: Lucy Church Amiably
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Plain Editions, Paris
Publication date: 1930 First Edition
Format: Hardback. Original publisher's ink blue cloth, lettered black on spine and on front cover. At head of title: 'A novel of romantic beauty and nature and which looks like an engraving.'
Pages: 240
Book Condition: Tiny label on rear pastedown of Brentano's Paris. Printed price on rear board 'Three Dollars.' Spine tanned, hinges somewhat rubbed and very slightly cracked but holding well with some slight spotting to covers and some slight staining to front top edge.
Lucy Church Amiably is a modernist text, written in the summer of 1927 when Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas spent the summer in a house in the French countryside near the Rhone. First published in 1930 it was the initial offering of Plain Editions, the press that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein created for the sake of publishing Stein’s work after Stein had grown frustrated with finding a publisher.
The book is notable for its celebration of the waterfall beside which much of it was written. It is also noted for its design and electric indigo cover which mimicked the design of school student’s copy books at the time, a decision which Stein saw as raising the book from the level of a novel to the level of the book-object. Stein typically used notebooks as the measure of her compositions, adjusting her writing to fit the blank, bound space. She often worked with groups of copybooks, filling in the pre-printed blanks with private names she and Toklas gave each other.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein writes that she wanted the book "to look like a school book and to be bound in blue", and records the "childish delight amounting to ecstasy" seeing it in the windows of bookstores. "She had never seen a book of hers in a bookstore window before... and she spent all her time in wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy Church Amiably in the windows".
