One of Only Fifty Copies, Signed by the Author
Death Comes for the Archbishop.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
Full Description:
CATHER, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
First edition, One of only fifty copies printed on Japanese vellum and signed by Cather, this being copy number 43. Octavo (9 x 5 7/8 inches; 228 x 150 mm). [viii], 303, [1, colophon] pp. List of author’s works and title-page printed in blue and black.
Publisher’s full vellum decoratively stamped in gilt on front cover, publisher’s symbol stamped in gilt on rear panel. Spine stamped and lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt, others uncut. Some light browning to spine, and some minimal foxing to binding. Previous owner's bookplate to front pastedown. Otherwise a near fine copy of this exceptionally scarce book. Housed in a custom Sangorski & Sutcliffe quarter vellum over tan cloth clamshell, spine lettered in gilt.
"Based on the story of the first bishop of New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop received great praise from Cather's fellow novelist Rebecca West, who wrote, "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us. This account of the activities of a French priest who was given a diocese in the southwest during the late 'forties, impresses us first of all by its amazing sensory achievements. She has within herself a sensitivity that constantly presents her with a body of material which would overwhelm most of us, so that we would give up all idea of transmitting it and would sink into a state of passivity; and she has also a quality of mountain-pony sturdiness that makes her push on unfatigued under her load and give an accurate account of every part of it...'" ("The Classic Artist," The Strange Necessity, 1928, pp. 233-40).
Nearly forty years later, Louis Auchincloss extended his compliments, "Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was her most popular and is, in some ways, her most excellent novel...The paradox in Willa Cather's theory of fiction, the novel démeublé, or stripped of all unnecessary descriptions and stratagems, the novel that must almost flow by some process of artistic free association from a mind that has fully assimilated the characters and scenes to be portrayed, is that she herself did not abide by it. Although her completed novels may be somewhat shapeless, they are filled with little gems of short stories, insets, that might have been conceived and plotted by Guy de Maupassant himself. ...Death Comes for the Archbishop is like a gallery of brilliantly lit dioramas in a historical museum illustrating life in the American Southwest a century ago. Everything falls into place because the reader accepts the era and the locale as in themselves creating a frame and hence a form..." ("Willa Cather," Pioneers and Caretakers, 1965, pp. 114-17)
Crane.
HBS 69684.
$8,500.
Price: $8,500.00
Item #69684