Ten promotional broadsides for M’lle New York
New York: M’lle New York Publishing Company, 1895-1896. Ten color-lithographed posters of varying sizes, measuring between 12 and 19 inches high and between 8.5 and 20 inches wide, printed on various paper stocks. Penciled dates to top corner of nine posters; pencil sketch to one verso. Light edgewear, short closed tear to January 1896 poster.
Ten promotional posters for the first year of M’lle New York, a fortnightly illustrated magazine that ran from August 1895 to January 1899. Edited by Vance Thompson and James Huneker, and primarily illustrated by Thomas Fleming and Thomas Powers, M’lle New York was inspired by the sophisticated, satirical French weeklies of the day. More than any other American periodical, it captured a bohemian sensibility, its colorful pages crowded with literary translations, risqué drawings, and advertisements aimed at a cosmopolitan male readership. Paul Verlaine, Knut Hamsun, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Henrik Ibsen all appeared in its pages. While “off the radar of broader culture,” M’lle New York was nonetheless “an important instance of a coterie publication, one with a strong avant-gardist and French influence, and one that more clearly serves as a precursor to modernist little magazines than others of this period.” See Kirsten MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation. The strong graphic identity of M’lle New York is reflected in these promotional posters, which were eventually offered for sale by the editors as a fundraiser: “We’ve been besieged with requests for them.” The posters assembled here date from August 1895 to January 1896. Eight are by Thomas Fleming (seven signed in the image, one unsigned), one by Thomas Powers, and one, “The Journalistic Orchid,” by editor James Huneker’s wife, the artist Clio Hinton Huneker. The posters feature depictions of nude or nearly nude women alongside grotesques of various kinds: a satyr, a capitalist “pig,” a mask, ethnic caricatures. The one outlier is a straightforward announcement of a new short story by Edward W. Townsend in the inaugural issue. OCLC locates a single holding of M’lle New York posters at Hofstra. An uncommon and compelling group.
Price: $2,200.00