2225/​6076

E.E. Cummings (b. 1894, d. 1962)

No Thanks. New York: Golden Eagle, 1935. Oblong quarto. Holograph edition trade issue, but unnumbered, signed on fly leaf. Privately bound in full morocco, gilt title on spine. Housed in slipcase.

[...]. He dedicated it to the 14 well-known publishers who had turned it down, incorporating the title into the list of their names, “[No Thanks] to.”, printed in the shape of a funeral urn. The book is unconventionally bound on the top rather than the left, like a stenographer's pad. In a letter to his aunt on 11 March 1935 Cummings expressed his frustration at the alteration in the appearance of the poems printed from his typewriter to that of the publisher's linotype machine: “am fighting - forwarded and backed by a corps of loyal assistants - to retranslate 71 poems out of typewriter language into linotype-ese. the linotype (being a gadget) inflicts a preestablished whole - the type ”line“ - on every smallest part; so that the words, letters, punctuation marks & (most important of all) spaces-between-these various elements, awake to find themselves rearranged automatically” (Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings, pp. 140–41). Catherine Reef, E. E. Cummings, Clarion Books, 2006.

Auction

Books and manuscripts, 21 June 2022

Category
Estimate

4,000–6,000 DKK

Sold

Price realised

6,000 DKK  

8 bids

When Bidder Bid
6,000 DKK
(Auto bid) 5,500 DKK
5,000 DKK
(Auto bid) 4,400 DKK
4,200 DKK
(Auto bid) 3,400 DKK
3,200 DKK
2,000 DKK