ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHTS OF 20TH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY: 1933 SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF DORIS ULMANN AND JULIA PETERKIN’S ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL, WITH 90 SUPERB HAND-PULLED PHOTOGRAVURES, SCARCE PUBLISHER’S SLIPCASE AND EXTRA PHOTOGRAVURE ADDITIONALLY SIGNED BY ULMANN

ULMANN, Doris and PETERKIN, Julia. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Robert O. Ballou, (1933). Large quarto, original gilt-lettered three-quarter linen, brown paper-covered boards with imprinted image of an African-American woman on the front cover, top edge gilt, untrimmed edges; original cardboard slipcase.

Signed limited first edition, number 93 only 350 copies (327 of which were offered for sale) signed by both photographer Doris Ulmann and writer of the text Julia Peterkin. With 90 superb tissue-guarded full-page copperplate hand-pulled photogravure plates-this copy with the scarce extra photogravure plate signed in pencil by Ulmann laid in.

“Ulmann’s photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin… focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina… Peterkin, a popular novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne, one of the state’s richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll… Ulmann’s soft-focus photos—rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here—straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory” (Roth). This deluxe edition should not be confused with the trade edition which was issued in a significantly smaller format and with fewer plates which were printed in half-tone as opposed to photogravure. The extra signed photogravure plate that was issued only with this deluxe edition replicates the image that appears opposite page 14. Few copies of this deluxe edition had been distributed at the time of Ulmann’s death in 1934; most were donated by her heirs to the Tuskegee Institute to be sold for that school’s benefit. This copy from the collection of William T. Wynn, whose recollections of an evening with Ulmann and Peterkin appear in a typewritten note affixed to the rear pastedown, which reads in part: “I do believe that each of us carried away within ourselves the memory of one of those rare and choice evenings that one thinks back to as a treasure… Thus passes worldly glory-not sadly (sic transit gloria mundi), but happily to be remembered.” With previous owner typed inscription tipped to rear pastedown.

Scarce original cardboard slipcase expertly restored. Original cloth slightly toned; a bit of only the most minor marginal foxing. A near-fine copy. Rare in this condition and with the original slipcase and the extra photogravure.