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Lot 71

Sale 6285 - Books and Manuscripts
Mar 27, 2025 10:00AM ET
Live / Philadelphia
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Estimate
$800 - 1,200
Price Realized
$2,048
Sold prices are inclusive of Buyer’s Premium

Lot Description

[Art] Hockney, David, and Stephen Spender, et al. Hockney's Alphabet


(London): Faber and Faber for the Aids Crisis Trust, (1991). First edition, signed by Hockney in green ink and Spender in red ink. 4to. Illustrated with 27 off-set color lithographed plates, by Hockney. Publisher's yellow buckram, spine stamped in blue and in gilt; in original grey slip case.

A near-fine copy of this signed first edition, published in 1991 to support the Aids Crisis Trust and raise money for those suffering from AIDS. Featuring 26 alphabetical illustrations by David Hockney, and accompanied with textual interpretations from some of the late 20th century's most esteemed writers, including Doris Lessing, William Boyd, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, William Golding, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Nigel Nicolson, Seamus Heaney, Douglas Adams, Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Pritchett, Erica Jong, Arthur Miller, John Julius Norwich, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Norman Mailer (humorously, considering his contribution is a letter to Spender declining to be involved with the publication), Ian McEwan, Anthony Burgess, Ted Hughes, Paul Theroux, Gore Vidal, and T.S. Eliot (who had died in 1965, with his text contributed by his wife, Valerie Eliot).

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