The Princess Casamassima: A Novel.

JAMES, Henry.

$12,500.00

Item Number: 135364

London: Macmillan and Co., 1886.

First edition in book form of one of James’s “three formidable novels” published in the 1880s along with The Bostonians and The Tragic Muse. Octavo, three volumes, original publisher’s cloth with gilt titles to the spine, half-titles, 2 pages of advertisements at rear of vols. II and III. From the library of Barton Currie with his bookplate to the pastedown and later Maurice Sendak, although not marked. American journalist, author, and book collector Barton Currie contributed hundreds of articles and stories for publications such as New York Evening World, New York Evening Sun, Harper’s Weekly and Good Housekeeping in the early part of the 20th century. Currie wrote from personal experience of the effect of bibliomania on the collector in his memoir Fishers of Books (1931), “The first symptom of bibliomania manifests itself by producing a form of somnambulism. You come out of a bookshop carrying a first edition of something or other. You cannot explain how or why you got it, or what you paid for it. But you have it; and when you arrive home with it you creep off to some secluded room and examine it. Then occurs the first little burning exaltation. Just a little glow to begin with, then by infinite gradations a consuming fire.” 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. Housed in a custom clamshell box by Zaehnsdorf. An exceptional example with noted provenance.

"The Princess Casamassima, a panoramic novel with a vivid English setting, documents a sensitive bookbinder's attempt to come to terms with his illegitimate birth and social disadvantages through involvement in subversive political action. Even more naturalistic than its predecessor [The Bostonians], The Princess reads today like an elegy for the beauty and traditions painfully evolved by civilized society and now endangered by what Yeats called 'mere anarchy'" (Gargano, 122).