The Sixties Catalogue

T h e S I X T I E S 66 “With Love And Thanks For ‘The Musicians’” 64. SEXTON, Anne. All My Pretty Ones. Boston and Cambridge, 1962. Slim octavo, original half black cloth, dust jacket. $2900. Click for more info First edition, presentation copy, of Sexton’s second collection of autobiographical poetry, inscribed in the year of publication to illustrator Barbara Swan, whose lithograph, “The Musicians,” inspired the 1964 poem, “To Lose the Earth”: “For Barbara, with love and thanks for “The Musicians”—Anne. Dec-1962.” A collection “of torment and reflection transposed into personal poetry reveals power” ( Kirkus Review ). This presentation copy is inscribed to Barbara Swan, a well-known American lithographer, painter, and illustrator, who developed important collaborative relationships with several creative women (including Sexton) through a grant at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. Swan provided pen-and-ink illustrations for several of Sexton’s books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Live or Die . Book about fine. Dust jacket extremely good, with a bit of wear mainly to extremities. A desirable inscribed copy with an interesting association. “If this is hell, then hell could not be much, neither as special nor as ugly as I was told.”