The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays

Boston: Houghton Miffflin Company - The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1948. Hard Back. Very Good/Fair. 5 3/4" x 8 1/2. Rose, Francis - Decorator. 83 Pages. The only information on the copyright page is 'Printed by Hely's Limited Dublin Ireland'. Boards are light gray-green with red decorations on front and red spine lettering with decorated endpapers. No defects noted to this as new book with flawless interior text pages. Previous owner's last name and 1949 date in red on the half-title page. No other marks or stamps. Dust jacket is a bit tattered with a couple of very small pieces missing. The jacket is complete with the flap price $3. Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874 She studied at Radcliffe during the years 1893 to 1897 and attended Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1897 to 1902. In 1902 she travelled the Continent with her family and decided to stay on in France indefinitely. Most American GI's passing through Paris got to know Gertrude Stein, not as someone exotic and arty, but as a vigorous, earthy old lady who insisted on good housekeeping, direct questions, and direct answers. She stayed in her beloved France (at her farm in Belignen) all during the Occupation and returned to her spotless, polished apartment on the Rue Christine after the Liberation. She was a familiar figure walking along the river, leading her white poodle, Basket. She liked to sit around Red Cross Clubs talking to the boys. If celebrities of the 20'S and 30's found her inaccessible, infantrymen of the 40'S found her as easy to talk to as their own grandmothers. Active to the end, she died in the spring of 1946, at the American hospital at Neuilly, a brief week after attending a reception for Richard Wright at the publishing house of Gallinard. Gertrude Stein's last and perhaps most delightful book is this posthumously published 1948 edition cleverly designed and illustrated by Francis Rose and beautifully produced by Maurice Fridberg of Dublin and London. A collector's item of charm and originality, it is barely possible that the genius of Gertrude Stein will live on in this unpretentious little volume when the results of her head-on collision with the Lost Generation have long since been forgotten. Like Alice In Wonderland it is a juvenile for adults. There are no tender buttons in this one, no insistence on geography and roses, nothing about Ida or Brewsie and Willie or Picasso and Matisse or Alice B. Toklas or Paris, France.