The Fountain Overflows.

WEST, Rebecca.

$500.00

Item Number: 145967

New York: The Viking Press, 1956.

First edition of this classic work. Octavo, original half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “My love to Beatrice and Bruce- who first gave the Fountain its chance to flow Rebecca West 1965.” 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.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket, with the owner’s name to the front free endpaper. Jacket design by Jeanyee Wong. An excellent association.

In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.