In This Our World.
[Gilman] Stetson, Charlotte Perkins. In This Our World. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1898.
16mo.; title page printed in black with publisher’s device in orange; frontispiece photographic portrait of Gilman; narrow ribbed navy blue cloth, decorated trade binding in gilt by Marion Louise Peabody (with her paraphe at the front cover) of a torchiere of intertwined vines with the flame of the torch throwing out brilliant rays of light above the title at the front cover, with the torchiere device repeated at the spine; t.e.g.; near fine.
Third edition, enlarged again: the first edition (1893) printed 75 poems; the second edition (1895) added 46 more. This volume, issued in 1898 in a printing of 2000 copies (according to the publisher’s notice), included a total of 148 poems. This edition saw five printings, the last in 1914. Gilman wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime, poems that went to the core of her feminist beliefs. Curiously, she chose to collect relatively few of them in In This Our World, which underwent three revisions such that no edition completely overlaps another. While some poems such as “The Obstacle” appear in every edition, others such as “The San Francisco Hen,” “In re ‘Andromaniacs’,” “Work and Wages,” and “My Cyclamen,” among others appear only in the third edition, which remains the most inclusive of all the editions of the title. Scharnhorst 170.
This binding is a very early Peabody design. Nancy Finlay in Artists Of The Book In Boston 1890-1910 identifies Peabody’s first design as The Fairy Spinning Wheel in November of 1898, which this binding clearly predates.
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