March 2021 Catalogue

8 I m a g i n e d W o r l d s E a r l y M a r c h 2 0 2 1 Presentation/Association Copy Of Italo Calvino’s The Baron In The Trees , Warmly Inscribed By Him To Roslyn And William Targ 6. CALVINO, Italo. The Baron in the Trees. New York, 1959. Octavo, original cloth, dust jacket. $2800. Click for more info First American edition of the renowned Italian fantasist’s remarkable fifth book, inscribed by him to his literary agent Roslyn Targ and to noted editor and bibliophile William Targ: “For Roz and Bill, one of the oldest books of this old friend, Italo.” Calvino novels of the 1950s “marked a shift to the kind of fiction for which he became famous: fabulations, often set in between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, that deal wittily and exuberantly with questions of knowledge, formalism and ontology… The Baron in the Trees —in which an 18th-century baron’s son climbs a tree in an act of defiance and ends up spending his life in various treetops—displays the narrative extravagance and intellectual playfulness that characterize Calvino’s more overt fantasies” (Clute & Grant, 159). First published in Italian as Il Barone rampante in 1957. Inkstamps of Roslyn Targ Literary Agency. Literary agent Roslyn Targ handled foreign rights for Calvino’s books; her husband William Targ was a noted editor and bibliophile. Book fine, dust jacket with toning to spine, a few minuscule rubs. A near-fine inscribed association copy. “We’ll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.”