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Item Details
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| Heading: |
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| Author: |
Miller, Henry |
| Title: |
SOLD BY PRIVATE TREATYTyped carbon of a letter sent to "an old friend" (Cohen) from Paris in 1928 |
| Place: |
[Paris] |
| Publisher: |
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| Date: |
[1928] |
| Item # : |
196353 |
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| Sale Number |
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424 |
| Lot Number |
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94 |
| Sale Name |
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| The Library of Roger Wagner |
| Sale Date |
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03/18/2010 |
| Sale Time |
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1pm PST |
| Low Estimate |
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$ 500 |
| High Estimate |
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$ 800 |
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* No Lots sell for less than half the Low Estimate. Some Lots may have Reserves. |
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| Description: |
| 9 page typed carbon letter. |
| The letter was written while Miller and his wife June spent six months touring Europe in 1928 (June had extracted the money necessary for the trip from her "patron", Pop). This contains Miller's earliest recorded impressions of Paris and Europe and predates his move to Paris by nearly two years. Of Germany, Miller writes disgustedly: "At Aachen, I think it was, just over the French border, I caught the first glimpse of that boorish spirit which the world insists on calling German. Factory workers, stripped to the waist, making their toilet in 4th class trains, throwing ugly grimaces at the tourists, begging for cigarettes, heads shaved - as thoroughly bestial and depraved in appearance as a machine man can become. You remember George Grosz's caricatures? Hell, they are not even caricatures. The man is the most painstaking photographic realist..." Miller, true to style, takes up 2 or 3 pages with descriptions of toilets in Poland and Paris, then goes back to architecture and street scenes in Paris: "...And then the bookshops and the bookstalls. Wonderful! Especially those along the quays, where at night the possessions are all locked up in strong boxes that repose calmly on the walls of the Seine embankment. What a pity not to know French! Books are dirt cheap here - and what books. Anything and everything you want... Then as to the inhabitants. Whiskers still flourish, and corduroys, and wide sashes around the belt. Fairies galore - this must be their Paradise. At night squads of street- walkers, but all bunched pretty much in one or two localities. For the most part Paris is eminently respectable - frightfully bourgeois, in fact. Prostitution is no index of great liscence...The French, I imagine, take their women like they take their wines and apéritifs. Anybody who calls Paris wicked does not know his New York..." A wonderful letter comparing America to Europe, Brooklyn toughs to Paris toughs, sex-drives of Americans and French, etc. While a carbon, the letter is likely unpublished and an important contribution to Miller's early history in Europe. |
| Condition: |
| Fine. |
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