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Yeiser, Idabelle. Moods, A Book of Verse. With Pen Sketches by Lindsey B. Murdah (Colony Press, Philadelphia, 1937) First Edition. Original boards and cloth spine. 89pp. Lacking front blank flyleaf.

An “intellectual poet” with a Ph.D. in French from Columbia, Yeiser had traveled in France and Africa during the 1920s while a literary leader of the Philadelphia New Negro movement, more in keeping with the “genteel” philosophy of Alain Locke, than the more “radical” writers of Harlem. She published academic papers, essays (one a “powerful vignette of African American history”) and short stories, but this was her first book of poetry, sonnets and free verse with themes of Nature, Children, Love and Philosophy, and “free of racial overtones”. The illustrator was also African-American, a Philadelphia painter and interior decorator. The book is relatively scarce, surprisingly missing from the Blockson Collection.