Wine, Women and Words
Price: $1,500.00
Dalí, Salvador. Hard Cover. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948. Limited First Edition. Very Good.
Illustrated by Salvador Dalí, with full-page color illustrations, and black-and-white headpieces and tailpieces. First limited edition. One of the numbered copies signed by Billy Rose, this being number 1451. Additionally signed and vitriolically inscribed by American author Henry Miller to his close friend and barber Pierre Sicari on front free endpaper: "To me S.D. is a prick of the first water, I know, from intimate contact. May he live to screw himself! Henry Miller 1/31/73 / Especially inscribed for Pierre Sicari recently of Corsica [flourish]". Publisher's gilt cloth-backed white pictorial boards, with Dalí illustration of a statue with a rose head to front board, black label to spine lettered in gilt, red silk ribbon bookmark, and black topstain. Very good, with light wear to spine ends, light spotting to boards, corners rubbed to boards, and a touch of staining to fore-edge of text block. Overall, a remarkable inscription revealing bad blood between two major creative figures of the 20th century. In Wine, Women and Words, Billy Rose (Broadway lyricist, producer, and husband to legendary performer Fanny Brice) gives a personal account of his life on Broadway during its heyday. One of Billy Rose's many accomplishments was producing the 1943 Broadway musical, Carmen, which was an adaptation of Bizet's same-titled opera and featured an all-Black cast. Wine, Women and Words features captivating illustrations by the great Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí. Dalí (1904-1989) is best known for surrealist paintings including The Persistence of Memory (1931), The Elephants (1948), and Cabaret Scene (1922). Throughout his career he produced illustrations for special editions of literary works, including Dante's The Divine Comedy, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Henry Miller (1891-1980) was an American author whose signature works include the semi-autobiographical books Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). His books were frequently banned because of their shocking honesty and graphic descriptions of sex, most famously his book Tropic of Cancer, which was at the center of a landmark US obscenity trial in 1964. The US Supreme Court ultimately determined that, because of its literary merit, the book was not obscene, a ruling that helped loosen censorship in the American publishing industry. Henry Miller and his lover Anaïs Nin resided with Salvador and Gala Dalí for several months between 1940 and 1941 at writer and publisher Caresse Crosby's estate in Bowling Green, Virginia. From the outset, Miller and Nin clashed with the Dalís. In her diary, Nin reveals her annoyance at the Dalís' arrival at the estate: "Before anyone realized what was happening, the entire household was there for the sole purpose of making the Dalís happy. No one was allowed to set foot in the library because he wanted to work there…it was implicitly assumed that all were there to serve Dalí, the great, indisputable artist." Stephen J. Gertz of Booktryst writes, "Amongst a laundry list of things the Dalís did to annoy Miller and Nin was the couple's incessant public displays of affection, pawing each other at every opportunity… Dalí's sympathies for Franco in Spain were further reason for clashes; Miller and Nin were anti-Fascist" (2013). Pierre Sicari was Henry Miller's Hollywood, California barber and close friend, who, through his relationship with Miller, became one of the foremost collectors of his work. Item #BRO001
