Winter’s Tales.

DINESEN, Isak [Karen Blixen].

Item Number: 145954

London: Putnam & Co, 1949.

Later printing of this collection of stories by the author of Out of Africa. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Karen Blixen 24.9.1956 Rungstedlund Je responderai.” While in Africa, Blixen took as her motto “Je Responderai,” “I will answer,” from the family crest of her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton. She explained: “I liked this old motto so much that I asked Denys, an earlier pioneer in African than myself – although all we settlers who had come out before the war looked upon ourselves as one family, a kind of Mayflower people – if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular. The first of these was its high valuation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue – you may stroke them or you may strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?” Very good in a very good dust jacket, with a note regarding the motto “je responderai” paper clipped to the dust jacket. Jacket design by Robin Darwin. Uncommon signed.

"Dinesen's stories come toward one like the flashes...from a lighthouse on a strange and infrequently sighted coast--a coast beautiful and precarious, for it may be the last outreach of magic, but resting on bedrock" (Eudora Welty).