51 AMERICANA 66AGEE, James and EVANS, Walker. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Three Tenant Families. Boston, 1941. Octavo, original black cloth, dust jacket, custom box. $5000 First edition of this powerful and pioneering documentary photobook on the Great Depression— ”the epitome of the genre”—with 31 full-page photogravures, in very elusive original dust jacket. “In 1936, on a journalistic assignment, James Agee and Walker Evans shared the lives of three sharecropper families in the Depression-gaunt South. Their report on the experience… became one of 1941s unforgettable books” (New York Times). A groundbreaking collaboration between novelist and photographer, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is regarded today as a classic of American literature… Evans’ photographs—his only excursion into ‘true’ documentary—remain amongst the finest ever made” (Parr & Badger I:144). At the time of publication, Lionel Trilling called this “the most important moral effort of our American generation” (Kenyon Review). Published in a small edition—the book was not to be reissued until 1960—copies of the first edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are extremely scarce and very desirable. Mild toning to top edge, dust jacket with a bit wear to extremities, including a faint crease to the spine with usual toning. A near-fine copy. Signed By Franklin D. Roosevelt As President 65ROOSEVELT, Franklin D. The Democratic Book 1936. No place, 1936. Large folio, original full brown morocco gilt. $6000 Signed limited first edition, number 799 of an unknown limitation signed by President Roosevelt, with illustrated title and limitation pages, 19 full-page portraits, dozens of in-text half-tones and illustrations, and a facsimile of the Constitution. Sold to Democratic donors at $250 each to pay off the 1936 re-election debt, The Democratic Book 1936 contains information such as the party’s platform, election results, and statements from the President, his cabinet members, the first lady, and other important members of his administration. With dozens of contemporary advertisements, many in color. “Ralph M. Bashore” gilt-stamped on front board (all copies of this book were gilt-stamped for specific Convention delegates). In mid-1935 Bashore, “who had been the Pennsylvania Secretary of Forests and Waters, became Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Labor and Industry... he was also Secretary of the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee” (The Patriot, July 3, 1935). Interior generally fresh with faint dampstaining mainly to preliminaries, original brown morocco with expert joint repairs and restoration. “A Classic Of American Literature”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDg3OTM=