International Women’s Day: Five Rare Books for Collectors
A substantial run of Wheel Talk, a bicycling trade paper from the mid-1890s
Highlights of Peter Harrington's new catalogue To the Last Scratch of Ink: The Lives and Literature of Women to mark International Women’s Day on March 8 includes:
* a first edition of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, inscribed to Yvette Le Roy, the owner of the Harlem bookshop that invited Morrison to give the first public reading of her debut novel
* a luxuriously produced set of the Tale of Genji by Lady Shikibu Murasaki, considered to be the world’s oldest novel and the first written by a woman to achieve culture-defining status. The fifty-four-volume manuscript is housed in a beautiful custom-made lacquer cabinet.
* a collection of self-published magazines and personal diaries by a Michigan teenager Florence J. Beers, created in the 1920s. As the market has recognised and reappraised the cultural power of women’s romance fiction, this archive shows a young woman creatively and seriously editing, illustrating and publishing her own work.
* a substantial run of Wheel Talk, a bicycling trade paper from the mid-1890s, published at the height of the women’s cycling craze in Europe and America
* Tauchnitz Editions of three of Jane Austen’s novels from Edith K. Roosevelt’s Library, each bearing her bookplate and likely acquired during her European honeymoon
