Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: The Record of a Journey Through Yugoslavia in 1937.

WEST, Rebecca.

$2,500.00

Item Number: 145979

New York: The Viking Press, 1941.

First American editions of Rebecca West’s masterpiece. Octavo, 2 volumes, original cloth, cartographic endpapers. Association copy, warmly inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “But the journey would have been better if Beatrice and Bruce had been there. Rebecca West 1962.” The recipients, Bruce Gould and Beatrice Blackmar Gould were co-editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal for almost 27 years, from 1935 through 1962, including the golden years of the magazine. Time magazine wrote upon their 1962 retirement, the Goulds took an undistinguished journal in a field that “took the patronizing view that a woman’s interests were largely confined to the home” and led by “Beatrice’s sure feeling for the emancipated women’s tastes, it invited its readers to plunge up to the elbows not only in bread dough but in life.” The magazine pushed for “purity in politics as well as in maternity wards” and fought against venereal disease and child abuse. Attention-getting articles and addressing feminine health problems openly were published, as well as top fiction pieces.”

Part travelogue, part history, part love letter on a thousand-page scale, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a genre-bending masterwork written in elegant prose. But what makes it so unlikely to be confused with any other book of history, politics, or culture--with, in fact, any other book--is its unashamed depth of feeling: think The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire crossed with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. West visited Yugoslavia for the first time in 1936. What she saw there affected her so much that she had to return--partly, she writes, because it most resembled "the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking," and partly because "it was like picking up a strand of wool that would lead me out of a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found myself immured." Black Lamb is the chronicle of her travels, but above all it is West following that strand of wool: through countless historical digressions; through winding narratives of battles, slavery, and assassinations; through Shakespeare and Augustine and into the very heart of human frailty. "A masterpiece . . . as astonishing in its range, in the subtlety and power of its judgment, as it is brilliant in expression" (The Times, London). "There are only a few great travel books. Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one" (Larry McMurtry). Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century.