Quinquivara. Poems by C. L. Baldwin.

New York: Gremor Press, (1944). First edition. One of 300 copies. [vi], 58, [6, index and colophon] pp. with cover illustrations and six in-text illustrations by Ian Hugo. Publisher's white boards, front lettered and with design. Previous owner's discreet presentation. Some sunning at board edges and overall aging but a very good copy.Introduction by Anais Nin, who was had 'relations' with both the author and the illustrator of this volume. Her "Dear John" to C. L. Baldwin is quite famous: "Anais Nin had particularly harsh words for poet C.L. Baldwin, a onetime lover, who strayed outside his marriage to consort with her, only to return to his family. "The day I discovered your deadness -- long ago -- my illusion about you died and I knew you could never enter my world, which you wanted so much. Because my world is based on passion, and you know that my world, which you now deride, made Henry (Miller) a great writer. But in the middle of this fiery and marvelous give and take, going out with you was like going out with a priest. The contrast in temperature was too great" (SF gate, 2004). This copy is inscribed by "Lenny"."Ian Hugo was born Hugh Parker Guiler in Boston, Massachusetts on February 15, 1898. His childhood was spent in Puerto Rico (a "tropical paradise" the memory of which stayed with him and surfaced in both his engravings and his films) but he attended school in Scotland and graduated from Columbia University where he studied economics and literature. He was working with the National City Bank when he met and married author Anais Nin in 1923. They moved to Paris the following year where Nin's diary and Guiler's artistic aspirations flowered. Guiler feared his business associates would not understand his interests in art and music, let alone those of his wife, so he began a second life, as Ian Hugo. Ian and Anais moved to New York in 1939. The following year he took up engraving and etching, working at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, established at the New School for Social Research. Hugo began producing surreal images that often accompanied Nin's books. For Nin his unwavering love and financial support were indispensable, Hugo was "the fixed center, core...my home, my refuge" (Sept. 16, 1937, Nearer the Moon, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939). A fictionalized portrait of Hugo appears in Philip Kaufman's 1990 film, Henry & June." (Annex Galleries).