CURIE, Marie (1867-1934). Pierre Curie. Paris: Payot, 1924.

8vo. (Margins browned and brittle, single wormtrack in lower margin of last third of text.) Contemporary half morocco gilt, upper cover with gilt ship motif (slight wear to extremities); slipcase. Provenance: Marie Mattingly Meloney (1878-1943), journalist and friend of Curie (presentation inscription from the author, gift inscription to her son on front flyleaf in pencil, dated Christmas 1924); William Brown Meloney IV (bookplate and ship motif on binding).

PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY CURIE TO A FRIEND AND SUPPORTER on title-page: “To dear Missy / her friend / M. Curie.” Marie (“Missy”) Mattingly Meloney was one of the leading woman journalists of the United States, a magazine editor and a socialite who in the 1920s organized a fund drive to buy radium for Marie Curie and began a movement for better housing. She was a friend and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s. William Brown Meloney was born in San Francisco to a seafaring family, and at the age of eighteen became a shipping news and political reporter in San Francisco before moving to New York in 1901, where he worked for the New York World Newspaper. He wrote several novels and plays but concentrated on a history of shipping, The Heritage of Tyre.

Property from the Patrick Atkinson Collection, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CURIE, Marie (1867-1934). Pierre Curie. Paris: Payot, 1924.