“LIFE DOESN’T HOLD STILL”: LIMITED EDITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, ONE OF ONLY 52 SIGNED BY WELTY, WITH VINTAGE GELATIN SILVER PRINT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HER

WELTY, Eudora. Photographs. Jackson, Mississippi and London: University Press of Mississippi, (1989). Quarto, original full silver-lettered burgundy leatherette, original publisher’s plum silk slipcase with faux bone ties. WITH: Laid-in vintage gelatin silver print (8 by 10 inches), Welty inkstamp on print verso, original folding sleeve, original limitation caption leaf, loose as issued. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

Signed limited first edition, copy P of only 52 lettered copies (A-ZZ: most likely reserved for private distribution) signed by Welty, Deluxe edition with vintage gelatin silver print, “At Bowen’s Court, County Cork, Ireland,” containing Welty’s inkstamp on print verso, laid into original protective sleeve with limitation caption leaf, together housed in original plum silk folding box.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty began taking photographs professionally during the Great Depression while traveling across the South for the WPA. Her images so impressed those at New York’s Photographic Galleries that in 1936 she was offered a two-week show there. “That March, however, Welty received word that a small magazine called Manuscript would publish two short stories… That acceptance foretold the end of her photographic career. Welty used her camera for several years more but invested her creative energies in her writing… In her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), Welty paid respects to picture-taking by noting: ‘I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had…. These were things a story writer needed to know” (Frail, Smithsonian Magazine). Deluxe edition, one of only 52 lettered copies (A-ZZ) signed by Welty: with laid-in vintage gelatin silver print entitled “At Bowen’s Court, County Cork, Ireland.” Book containing over 225 tritones, most full page, of the Depression-era South, along with images of 1930s Manhattan and portraits of fellow writers such as Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen. With essay by Reynolds Price and a 1989 interview with Welty. As issued without dust jacket. Slipcase with mounted black-and-white photogravure (3 by 4-1/4 inches) to front panel. With bookplate of Ray A. Roberts, the legendary New York editor known for shepherding the works of literary giants such as Thomas Pynchon and John Fowles, as well as those of photographer Ansel Adams.

Signed book, vintage print and slipcase in fine condition. Scarce.