Audubon
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1936). Single volume, measuring 8.75 x 6.25 inches: [10], 342. Original blue cloth boards lettered in silver, original clipped typographic dust jacket. Twelve full-color plates after Audubon prints, black-and-white illustrations throughout text, biographer’s note and index at rear. Bookplate to front pastedown. Dust jacket spine sunned, edgewear and shallow chips to extremities, small tape repair to back panel of jacket.
First edition of this illustrated biography of John James Audubon, written by pioneering American anthropologist and folklorist Constance Rourke: “This biography had its more distant origin in a concern with American frontiers . . . but characters have a way of transcending the liveliest general questions.” In her interest in Audubon as an immigrant and an artist, Rourke emphasized the resourcefulness and creativity that epitomized, for her, the American sensibility. Audubon was a Newbery Honor book for 1937, though Rourke maintained that the biography was not written solely for children. A very good example, in notoriously fragile dust jacket.
Price: $150.00