BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 52 78HUGHES, Langston. Shakespeare in Harlem. New York, 1942. Octavo, original half orange and black cloth, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $7500 First edition of Hughes’ major book of poetry, inscribed, “Dear Noël—Much of this book, you know, was written at Hollow Hills. But the poems are of much less pleasant places. Happiness to you always! Langston. New York, February 6, 1942.” “Shakespeare in Harlem was emphatically, unashamedly about being Black… In building this book of poems on the blues, Langston had returned to the inspiration for his greatest creative period” (Rampersad, Life V.I:390). The recipient of this copy, beloved California art patron Noël Sullivan, was “as close a friend as any relative Hughes ever had… for a quarter of a century Sullivan was the poet’s most trusted confidant” (Berry, Langston Hughes, 150). Hughes dedicated his first collection of short stories, Ways of White Folks (1934) to Sullivan, who regularly offered Hughes refuge at his home in San Francisco and his farm in Carmel—the “Hollow Hills” of the inscription. Sullivan eventually built Hughes his own cottage at the farm, providing an ever-ready retreat for the writer. Book fine, dust jacket with a few short closed tears, toning to spine. An excellent presentation copy to a person very important to Hughes. “The First Popular Book About Afro-American Folklore Ever Written By A Black Scholar” 79HURSTON, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia, 1935. Octavo, original brown cloth, dust jacket. $6800 First edition of Hurston’s first non-fiction work, widely viewed as her masterpiece, highly elusive in the original dust jacket. To Alice Walker, who discovered Hurston through Mules and Men, she was “The Genius of the South”— words Walker engraved on Hurston’s gravestone. “When I read Mules and Men, I was delighted. Here was the perfect book.” For Walker, it embodied “the quality I feel in most characteristic of Zora’s work… Black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings”(emphasis in original, Hemenway, xii). “The first popular book about Afro-American folklore ever written by a Black scholar, Mules and Men so compellingly displays the rich imaginative life in a Black community that Alan Lomax has called it ‘the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore’” (Hemenway, 6, 60). Offsetting from glue to front free endpaper and faintly to the half title; cloth near-fine, with a bit of toning to spine ends. Rare unrestored dust jacket with chipping to spine head, splitting along spine folds. An extremely good copy. “Much Of This Book, You Know, Was Written At Hollow Hills”
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