Cane

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923. First Edition. Very Good. First edition, first printing of the classic Harlem Renaissance novel. Extremely rare, signed by Jean Toomer and inscribed to a former owner on the front free endpaper, "To Fay De Frantz with warm regards for one who feels so warmly about this book and its author [signed] Jean Toomer". Bound in publisher's buff cloth stamped in yellow and black; lacking the scarce dust jacket. Very Good with light lean to binding, light soiling and wear to cloth. Pages tanned, small tear and crease to the top of the front free endpaper, several margins show chips or short mended tears at the fore edge. Glue (truncated) repair to hinge at rear pastedown and evidence of removal of an old bookseller ticket with offsetting to the rear free endpaper. The first appearance of a classic of modern American fiction and pinnacle of the Harlem Renaissance. In his foreword Waldo Frank dubs it "a harbinger of the South's literary maturity: of its emergence from the obsession put upon its mind by the unending racial crisis-an obsession from which writers have made their indirect escape through sentimentalism, exoticism, polemic, 'problem' fiction, and moral melodrama. It marks the dawn of direct and unafraid creation." Signed copies are incredibly scarce. (Inventory #: 140944578)