1450 - 1950

Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929. First edition. One of 150 copies printed. Minkoff A25. Presentation copy, inscribed by the publisher, Harry Crosby, to his father: "SVRC [Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby] from Harry", with an accompanying sketch of his personalized sun symbol and the Black Sun Press's emblem. "In August Harry (Crosby) delivered one hundred and fifty copies of 1450-1950 to Brown, who quickly sent most of them on to publishers and friends, sixty of whom he listed opposite the title page under the heading "Free Copies." In return, Brown hoped for a (truncated) few kind words that might be useful in reviving a writing career that had been quiescent for close to fifteen years. 1450-1950 is an amusing mixture of ideography and calligraphy, examples of which Brown had been amassing - with obvious pleasure - for many years. "I like looking back / at the / Illuminated manuscripts of / 1450 / And forward / to the / more Illuminations / Movie Scripts of / 1950 I like to see / Fly Specks / on yellowed pages / I like too / Leaving my own on / New ones / My Fly Speck." In his dedication to "all monks, all early oriental artists . . . " Brown playfully attempted to locate his work in the history of innovative printing and himself among those authors celebrated as much for their matter as for their manner of expression. By early fall, he had gathered a garland of testimonials from, among others, Gertrude Stein, H. L. Mencken, and William Carlos Williams." Harry Crosby was found dead in his New York studio on December 10th, 1929, evidently a casualty of a suicide pact: in one hand he held a pistol, and in his other arm, his twenty year old lover, Josephine Noyes Rotch Bigelow, also dead of a bullet to the temple. - Hugh Ford, Published In Paris (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1975), p. 200- 210. On the same day, Crosby had made his last entry in his diary: "One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved." When Jonathan Williams reissued 1450-1950 as Jargon 29 in 1959, the publisher observed: "That it should take him (JW) thirty years to locate a copy of Bob Brown's utterly charming and singular book is a measure of the almost cultish regard 1450-1950 has commanded from its contemporaries. If you didn't own a copy you were automatically cast into either of the modern outer darknesses then beginning to pullulate: Squaresville or Beat City. The virtues of 1450-1950 are publicly attested by many luminaries on the back cover blurb - among them, Geltte Burgess, who invented the word blurb." Among those quoted on the back cover are Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Walter Lowenfels, James Johnson Sweeney, Gelett Burgess, Stuart Davis, and Caresse Crosby, who wrote to Brown: "We show your book to everyone who comes to the house and they always find some page that so especially delights them that soon we will have to chain it down like an ancient missal.. A fine copy of a rare book with the "Crosby Cross" bookplate and the Black Sun Press blindstamp on the endpaper, in the publisher's gold foil folder, which is somewhat worn. 8vo, original printed wrappers, publisher's glassine dust jacket, publisher's foil folder. A fine copy of a rare book with the "Crosby Cross" bookplate and the Black Sun Press blindstamp on the endpaper, in the publisher's gold foil folder, which is somewhat worn. (Inventory #: 22389)