Italian Hours.

JAMES, Henry.

$12,000.00

Item Number: 135623

London: William Heinemann, 1909.

First edition, one of 1000 copies printed of James’ classic book of travel writing, wonderfully illustrated by Joseph Pennell. Quarto, original cloth decorated in gilt, top edge gilt. Illustrated by Joseph Pennell with 32 tissue-guarded color plates. Association copy, inscribed by Henry James on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, “To Edmund and Nelly Gosse their all, faithful old friend Henry James December 4th 1909.” The recipients, English poet, author, and critic Edmund Gosse and his wife, Pre-Raphaelite painter Ellen Gosse were two of James’ closest and longest-standing friends. James and Edmund exchanged more than 400 letters over the course of several decades and Gosse was a well-known literary figure in his own right, best known for his English translations Ibsen and the role he played in encouraging the careers of Yeats and Joyce. With Gosses’s bookplate to the pastedown, as well as that of Maurice Sendak who later acquired the book. Best known for his immensely popular illustrated children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak’s career was launched in 1952 with the publication of Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig. Their author-illustrator collaboration, facilitated by Harper & Row publisher and editor-in-chief of juvenile books Ursula Nordstrom, became something of a cultural phenomenon, spawning a host of imitators of their “unruly” and “rebellious” child protagonists. Now one of the scarcest and most desirable books in modern children’s literature, Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are faced many opponents and was banned in several libraries upon publication in 1963. Its challengers accused the work as being “too dark” and “traumatizing” to young children due to its often frightening imagery. It would become one of many “good books for bad children” edited and published by Nordstrom who disliked the genteel, sentimental tone of earlier American children’s literature and sought to change its purpose to appeal to children’s imaginations and emotions, rather than serve as adult-approved morality tales. In near fine condition. A very sharp example with exceptional provenance.

In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James's enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe.