RARE! The Red Lily by Anatole France Nobel Prize Winning author, Boni & Liveright publisher as part of the Modern Library series, 1924
RARE! The Red Lily by Nobel Prize Winning author and poet Anatole France.
ABOUT THE NOVEL (Courtesy of AbeBooks) Written by French poet Anatole France (1844-1924), journalist, and successful novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Red Lily was incorporated into The Modern Library of the World's Best Books series by publisher Boni & Liveright in 1924. Apparently Boni & Liveright were considered avant garde publishers of their day which drew some of the world's most renown authors to their door. Here's a bit about the publisher we found on Wikipedia...
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (Courtesy of Wikipedia) Boni & Liveright (pronounced "BONE-eye" and "LIVE-right") is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk. It was the first American publishers of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays. In his biography of Horace Liveright, Firebrand, author Tom Dardis noted B&L was "the most magnificent yet messy publishing firm this century has seen." In 1974 Liveright's remaining backlist was bought by W.W. Norton. Norton revived the name as an imprint in 2012. B&L's debut list called The Modern Library of the World's Best Books was a mix of well-known and hard-to-find literature priced at 60 cents apiece and bound in lambskin. The Modern Library in 1917, according to biographer Walker Gilmer, "reflected the avant-garde influence of [Albert Boni's] Washington Square book-borrowing friends: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Strindberg, Married; Kipling, Soldiers Three; Stevenson, Treasure Island; Wells, The War in the Air; Ibsen, A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, and Ghosts; France, The Red Lily; de Maupassant, Mademoiselle Fifi, and Other Stories; Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk; Maeterlinck, A Miracle of Saint Anthony; and Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism."
BIXLEY NOTES
• The Red Lily
• Written by Anatole France
• Published by Boni and Liveright, 1924
• Part of the The Modern Library of the World's Best Books
• 251 page lambskin leather bound book with gold print
• The book has no copyright date but is inscribed 1924 and matches research that suggest the publisher's logo was introduce din 1924
• Measures 6 1/2" x 4 1/4"
VINTAGE NOTES
• A beautiful copy in great condition
• A bit dingy from age but very little wear on the covers or pages
• Pages have yellowed
• Inscribed on the inside cover and inside front page, dated 1924
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