Printed and Manuscript Americana

New York: Robert O. Ballou, (1933). First edition, deluxe issue, #286/350 numbered copies signed by Julia Peterkin and Doris Ulmann. 4to. 341, (1) pp. Illustrated with photogravure frontispiece, 89 photogravure plates, and one additional photogravure plate signed by Ulmann laid in, as issued; all but three bound photogravures with tissue guards. Publisher's three-quarter white cloth over brown paper-covered beveled-edge boards, stamped in blind and in gilt, small pencil scrawl in lower front board fore-edge, spine ends browned; top edge gilt, other edges untrimmed; very light offsetting to title-page; foxing to pp. 317/318; loose plate toned and worn along edges, but not affecting image or signature. Blockson 3932; Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, pp. 78-79

A handsome copy of this rare signed deluxe edition of Julia Peterkin and Doris Ulmann's seminal photobook documenting the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. "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." (Roth)