GREENWICH VILLAGE TYPES TENEMENTS & TEMPLES by Wall, Bernhardt [ etcher] - 1920

[ New York: Printed and Published by the Artist, 1920. Quarto. Original cloth tape backed boards, with etched vignette. Separation between front free endsheet and second endsheet due to the weight of the boards, some creasing to spine, but a very good copy, internally fine. Rear panel of dust jacket present. First edition thus, and one of Wall's least common and most desirable productions, consisting of twenty-two original etchings printed from zinc plates in various hues, with each of the plates signed by the artist in the margin, accompanied by the original etched preliminaries, title, index and colophon. Wall had originally intended the edition to consist of fifty copies, but the zinc plates did not hold up sufficiently for that many impressions, and he reduced the edition to twenty-six copies (so corrected on the colophon in ink, and signed by him). Two of the original etched zinc plates are inlaid into the inside of the boards, in this case those for two of the best of the images: "Washington Square Arch" and "A Studio." A typed transcript of some comments Wall made in 1937 about the edition is laid in, along with a 1948 cover letter from Dawson's Book Shop. Weber does not note the truncation of the edition, gives a variant plate count - perhaps including some of the etched prelims in his count, as this copy collates complete according to the index, plus the two self- portraits - and notes "many copies have a cancelled plate embedded in the cover." As noted above, this copy, #22, has two of the original zinc plates, and unlike Father Weber's copy, has the etching on the upper board imprinted in the board itself, rather than on a separate label. The descriptive text leaf describes this as the "third state" of the project, no doubt referring to the 1918 TEN ETCHINGS OF GREENWICH VILLAGE. WEBER, p.31.