Winter of Artifice.
Inscribed to Her Editor
Nin, Anais. Winter of Artifice. Line engravings on Copper by Ian Hugo. (Paris: The Obelisk Press), [1939].
8vo.; top edge lightly darkened; endpapers faintly browned; decoratively printed black paper-covered boards; edgeworn. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition, of Nin’s first novel, the third and last volume published in Henry Miller’s Via Seurat series, limited to 500 copies, and signed by Nin at the colophon. Franklin, A3a. Nin’s bibliography does not indicate if she signed all of these copies, or what the print run was. With six copper engraved illustrations by Ian Hugo (Hugh Guiler), her husband. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For John/to celebrate our collaborations and our friendship/Anaïs. John Ferrone was Nin’s editor at Harcourt Brace in New York; he worked there from 1965 until 1982, and edited Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, and James Beard. Nin likely inscribed this book to Ferrone, sometime during the last seven years of her life, the period in which he was her editor.
Nin and Ferrone worked closely together on editing her diaries for publication. According to an interview with Morton Weisman of the Swallow Press, Nin originally offered her diaries to Alan Swallow at the Press for publication. The job of editing and publishing the diaries proved too large for this tiny publishing house, and Swallow made a deal for joint publication with Harcourt Brace in New York, where Ferrone became her editor.
Her body of work was reevaluated with the publication of her diaries, which today constitute an important document of the pre- and post-war aesthetic avant-garde. It appeared in six volumes from 1966-76; Linotte, the entries kept between the ages of 11 and 17, was published posthumously in 1978. According to the preface to Realism and Reality, Nin at one time planned to “convert and transpose” her diaries “into a full, long novel of the thirty years between 1914 and 1944—between two wars.’ Among the themes will be the artistic life of Paris, the drama of psychoanalysis, the transition from romanticism to realism, the birth and death of surrealism, and woman in her relationship to the present-day world” (p. 8).
Provenance: from the library of John Ferrone.
http://www.anaisnin.com/memories/weisman.html
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