ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL

New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933. Limited Edition, #229/350. Hardcover. Quarto, [12], 13-341 pages. Good. Bound in publisher's three quarter white linen, embossed brown paper boards, spine with gilt lettering. Top edge gilt. Some staining and discoloration to spine, particularly along hinges, from water. Tide-marks along upper and lower gutter throughout volume, in some cases touching the plates. Lacking publisher's slipcase.




Illustrated with 90 full-page, hand-pulled copper photogravures after photographs by Ulmann depicting the formerly enslaved alongside their descendants in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. All plates with tissue guards, one tissue guard loose. Some offsetting from photogravures, as usual. With the additional signed photogravure loose within, a duplicate of the photogravure on page 129. Some offsetting to front pastedown and endpaper from photogravure. "When all the sisters' feet are washed, the basins and towels are handed over to the brothers, who wash each other's feet." [page 124].




WP consignment. Shelved case 3. "Peterkin, a popular novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne, one of the state's richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll, and its black population the subject of Ullman's photograph...Ulmann's soft-focus photos - rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here - straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory" [Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pages 78-79]. 1367221. Shelved Dupont Bookstore.