Inscribed to French friends, Paul & Minnie Bourget
Twelve Poems.
London: Medici Society, 1926.
Price: $17,500.00
About the item
First edition. Copy number 6 of 130 numbered copies (of which 100 were for sale). [viii], 51, [5] pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Inscribed to French friends, Paul & Minnie Bourget. Cloth and paper covered boards, without dust jacket, as issued. Covers lightly tanned and foxed, endpapers tanned, with some scattered foxing on both pastedowns, a very good, otherwise bright copy. Garrison A40 (noting only copies with a printed facsimile signature on page [ii], not present here).
Item #328026
The bibliography notes only copies with a facsimile signature on p.ii, possibly indicating that this is one of the 30 copies retained by Wharton for presentation.
Warmly inscribed on the front fly to longtime friends and collaborators Paul and Minnie Bourget: "To Paul & Minnie, with love and long memories, from Edith. Christmas, 1926." Wharton's friendship with the French author and critic Paul Bourget and his American-born wife Minnie began in 1893 and continued for decades. The Bourgets eased Wharton's transition into the salons of French social and literary life. During the summer of 1899, Edith Wharton and her husband toured northern Italy and Switzerland with the Bourgets, and
Wharton dedicated *The Valley of Decision* to them: "To my friends Paul and Minnie Bourget in remembrance of Italian days together." Paul Bourget translated Wharton's novel *House of Mirth* into French, and contributed to *Book of the Homeless*, edited by Wharton in 1916. Minnie Bourget collaborated with Edith Wharton on the translation of a short story, "The Muse's Tragedy" (cf. Garrison AA2, Note two).
Wharton was self-conscious about her poetry, publishing only two volumes, both in small numbers. This is easily one of the rarest of her books, and with a wonderful association.
