Á las Señoras Católicas

[Lazos León, Florinda]. Á las Señoras Católicas. San Cristóbal [de las Casas], Mexico: np, 1926. Broadside. 46.5 x 33 cm. Thin colored paper, creased where folded, a few v minor defects at edges, otherwise very good condition.

Revolutionary soldadera, suffragist, journalist, and labor organizer, Florinda Lazos León (1898-1973) advanced feminist and labor causes throughout Mexico, but particularly in her home state of Chiapas. During the Revolution she was a nurse in the Carrancista Liberating Army of the South and participated in organizing both the first Congress of Women Workers and Peasants of Chiapas (1919) and the first National Congress of Women Workers and Peasants (1931).

Scholarship on Mexican suffrage often omits the fact that Chiapas was the first Mexican state to grant women full rights of citizenship (“just” the fourth to give them the right to vote). In 1926, Lazos León became the first woman elected to the Chiapas legislature, more than a quarter century before women won the right to vote nationally. Though a few women had been elected in the Yucatan in 1924, they were not allowed to serve, making Lazos León the first woman ever to serve in a state-level elected office in Mexico.

This broadside was published after Lazos León announced her candidacy in a July issue of the worker’s party newspaper that she edited, La Gleba, and shortly before her November election. It is addressed to the women of her hometown, San Cristóbal de las Casas. The text is a finessed position on the Cristeros Rebellion–a violent conflict between the Mexican state and the Catholic Church in the 1920s. The seeds of the rebellion began with the 1917 Mexican Constitution. It restricted the political and economic power of the Church through several measures: requiring primary schools to be secular, nationalizing their property, and banning public ceremonies; the Church’s power was further reduced by additional statues and enforcement beginning in 1924 during the Calles presidency. Following increased anticlerical persecution, the Catholic hierarchy refused to conduct public mass and closed their churches in 1926. This led to an unusual role for women, who became the leading lay ministers of their communities.

In the present document, Lazos Leon implores women not to be drawn into the conflict, or as she wrote, used as “cannon fodder” by powerful government and religious interests. Instead, she asks that they stay true to the roots of their Christianity and protect poor and working people (including the rights of indigenous peoples).

Truly a rare surviving primary document authored by Lazos León who has no author record in WorldCat.

(HOLD)

El solamente quería vivir: En Colombia la acción criminal de los grupos paramilitares [...]

Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Colombia. El solamente quería vivir: En Colombia la acción criminal de los grupos paramilitares debe terminar: La CUT ante las naciones unidas y la OIT. Bogota: 1988. Second (expanded) edition. 23 cm, 119 pp.; a number of b/w portraits, photo reproductions, of assassinated politicians, NGO members, etc, in illus. color wrappers, rear wrap with crease starting to tear (closed). Illus. by Luis Caballero.

Gathering a number of important manifestos, speeches, and texts primarily by the central national union, but including statements by other student groups and left-wing organizations against paramilitary groups in Colombia. Includes a multi-page blank template for reporting missing persons to the United Nations.

Edition history is a bit confusing, first edition recorded in OCLC as 1982 (one location in North America, UT-A), but the CUT didn’t exist until 1986 and many of the texts and documents in the second edition date to 1987 and 1988. 2nd e. held by Harvard, Princeton, and UT-A. First only at UT-A

$90

Acción Y Fe

La Unión Nacional de Sociedades Femeniles Cristianas. Acción Y Fe. Mexico, D.F.: Casa Unida, 1927. 22.5 cm, 79 pp/; color stapled wrappers with losses at spine and rear.

Collection of stories, plays, poems, and music for use by Protestant women in evangelical educational contexts: seemingly both in the home and in missionary work. A number of “dramas” present conversations between criollo/mestizo women and indigenous women and girls (Voces Feminines, Diaologos Misioneros). Another dialogue entitled “Cristo y las mujeres del mundo” describes the women of Japan, Africa, Turkey, India, etc.

Fascinating artifact of women’s evangelicalism in Mexico during the national indigenismo movement.

Not found in OCLC.

$125

Frente Popular en todo el mundo [...]

Dimitrof, G. [Dimitrov, Georgi]. Frente Popular en todo el mundo: La unidad obrera campesina en la lucha contra el fascismo. Mexico: Ediciones Frente Cultural, nd. [1935]. 19 cm, 111 pp.; color pictorial wrappers with losses, esp. to blank rear edges. A few chips in toned textblock. One signature, pp. 81-96, bound upside down.

The only Mexican edition of Georgi Dimitrov’s Stalinist speeches promoting the Popular Front at the Comintern Congress, 1935. Dimitrov was a Bulgarian communist and General Secretary of the Comintern from 1935-1943. With three loose illustrated advertisements for other communist publications by Ediciones Frente Cultural (EFC), and a booksellers ticket on rear wrap from Libreria Navarro (EFC having been founded by Navarro owner, Enrique Navarro Orejel).

One copy? of this edition located by WorldCat, at UT-A. Cataloged page numbers differ vastly (47pp according to UTA). Later Spanish editions published in Europe include Dimitrov’s speeches from Comintern congresses in 1936 and 1937.

$225

Acción Femenina [title from cover]: V Asamblea

[Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana]. Acción Femenina [title from cover]: V Asamblea. Mexico, D.F.: Imp. Claret, 1940. Oblong 29.5 cm, 110, [1], pp.; 5 b/w plates from photographs, 1 pl. of O.L of Guadalupe; in stapled paper wrapper, separating from textblock at inside front hinge.

Conference publication documenting the 5th annual assembly of the women’s branch of Mexican Catholic Action, a proclerical lay community action group made up of many of the smaller organizations, including the women’s brigades, that played an important part in the Cristeros armed conflict. That conflict ended in 1929 with a series of compromises between the church and state and the women’s orgs were newly centralized under the national group, supervised by the diocese. This conference index and speeches illustrate continued Catholic resistance against secular education and other socialist post-revolutionary government policies, including divorce (no) women’s emancipation (no) and civil marriage (no).

OCLC finds no physical holdings in US libraries.

$100

Exposición no. 2. Antonio Bonet: Arquitectura

Exposición no. 2. Antonio Bonet: Arquitectura. Exh cat. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona. Barcelona: 1960. Oblong, 18.5 cm, [12] pp.; b/w illus. throughout the architect’s projects in Latin America (primarily Argentina and Uruguay); stapled self-wrapper, lightly worn.

Catalogue of the second exhibit at the newly organized Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA). Curated by art critic and co-founder of MACBA, Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, it features photo-illustrations of architect Antonio Bonet’s work in Latin America, and an essay, “La Nueva Ciudad Latina de Antonio Bonet” by Oriol Bohigas. Bonet (1913-1989) cofounded the architectural and design collective Grupo Astral in Buenos Aires (inspired by the GATEPAC, in Catalunya).

The catalogue itself is a scarce artifact of the short lived original MACBA program. The museum existed from 1960-1963 when it closed for political reasons during the Franco regime. A museum of contemporary art was proposed by provincial authorities again in 1985, the new MACBA opened to the public in 1995.

We are able to locate only one other copy in museum and library collections, at the Museu Nacional d’art de Catalunya.

$225

Estudio a Trista

(Forner, Raquel) “Estudio a Trista …”. Gelatin silver print. 1955. 24 x 28 cm. Toned with signs of handling. Signed in ink recto with dedication to the poet Ilka Krupkin(?), manuscript title on verso (artist’s handwriting) with date.

$75

Berta Singerman

Wiltschur & Zanella Foto-Studio. Berta Singerman. Gelatin silver print. São Paulo, 1925. 16 x 12 cm. Surface lightly soiled, a few nicks at edges. Signed and dated recto by Berta Singerman to “Mundo Uruguays” [Mundo Uruguay]. Studio stamp verso and pencil annotation “recitadora argentina”.

Rare early signed publicity photograph of the Argentinian actress and singer Berta Singerman (1901-1998), whose Jewish family emigrated to South America from Russia in her early childhood. Her father founded the first Yiddish theater company in Buenos Aires and she joined the troop by age 10. In the 1920s she developed close friendships within the Argentinian avantgarde and moved in the circles of Storni, Mistral, and Quiroga. In addition to theater and movie roles, she was known for her poetry recitals.

Signed dedication to editors at the Uruguayan cultural magazine, Mundo Uruguay.

$125

Untitled Photograph of Alicia Penalba

Untitled. Vintage gelatin silver print, np, nd. (ca. 1965-1970). Sheet: 29 x 20.5 cm, image: 23 x 21 cm. VG.

Press photo? of Argentinian sculptor Alicia Penalba (1913-1982) at work with assistants. Penalba ran away from her childhood home to escape her domineering father and studied art in Buenos Aires and eventually in Paris, choosing to use her mother’s name professionally rather than her patronym (Pérez).

She found great success in Europe and the US, with monumental public commissions alongside smaller works, jewelry, and decorative objects. She won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial in 1961, and participated in Documenta II and III. Her 1968 retrospective exposition Totems et tabous. Lam, Matta, Penalba, at Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris solidified her status alongside two other recognized masters of Latin American modernism.

$125

Otoño Imperdonable

Walsh, María Elena. Otoño Imperdonable. Buenos Aires: [Imp. Ferrari], 1947. First edition. 20.5 cm, 78 pp.; interior evenly toned, wrapper bumped and a bit faded, separating at internal hinge. Signed dedication from the author to the poet and tango critic/historian León Benarós, dated 31-7-1947.

María Elena Walsh (1930-2011) was a nationally beloved Argentinian poet, singer, and composer. Walsh published her first book of poetry at the age of 17. These adolescent verses, reissued numerous times over the next 30 years, were praised by a remarkable list of literary greats including Pablo Neruda, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Juan Ramón Jimenez. Following a trip in 1948 to Paris, she began her musical career, forming the group “Leda & María” with her romantic partner Leda Valladares. The two women toured extensively in Europe before Walsh returned to live in Argentina in 1956.

Much of her later poetry and music was written for children, including a number of anti-dictatorship and anti-censorship songs. She lived openly with her partner, the photographer Sara Facio, from 1978 until her death in 2011.

OCLC records 3 holdings in North America.

$750

La Trampa

Portal, Magda. La Trampa. Lima: Ediciones Raiz, 1956 [1957]. First edition. 17.5 cm, 138, (2), pp.; textblock toned with some foxing, illustrated wrapper bumped and foxed, flaps with author portrait, bio, and blurbs.

La Trampa is the only novel written by one of Peru’s most important writers, the revolutionary feminist Magda Portal (1900-1989). The semi-autobiographical story is a political murder mystery; she wrote it to sway public opinion on the imprisonment of Carlos Steer Lafón, responsible for the double assassination of a newspaper magnate and his wife in 1935. The character María de la Luz is based on Portal’s own experiences as a poet, activist, leader of an Aprista party, and a political prisoner.

Scarce in commerce.

$100

Quienes traicionaron al pueblo

Portal, Magda. Quienes traicionaron al pueblo? Lima: Salas é Hijos, 1950. 17 cm, 30 pp.; frontispiece portrait, some underlining, in stapled wrappers, toned and sunned, three pin holes near top of wrapper extend through publication. Black strikethrough over orig. price on rear wrap. Signed in ink by the author with dedication to Richard Lee Chin.

Revolutionary feminist Magda Portal’s Aprista manifesto written after her trial by a military tribunal, describing her opposition to the leaders of the failed Peruvian Aprista uprising in 1948. Rear wrap references her famous “Flora Tristan” essay?

$75

Diez Maestros

Diez Maestros. Buenos Aires: Plan Cultural de la Manufactura de Tabacos “Particular”, 1935. 18.5 cm, 185 pp.; fore-edges foxed, interior clean; wrapper foxed and stained, edges bumped, spine chipping.

Proceedings of a radio conference held simultaneously in Madrid and Buenos Aires. Commercially sponsored by a tobacco company, the list of participants included José Ortega y Gasset, Victoria Ocampo, Leopoldo Lugones, and Manuel Azaña among others. The volume contains the first published iteration of Ocampo’s dogmatic feminist literary manifesto: La mujer y su expresión. An important item for Ocampo bibliographies and a curious artifact of an industrial manufacturer’s “cultural plan” that brought together “illustrious” hispanic authors, political philosophers, scientists, and poets (many with socialist beliefs).

OCLC lists 2 copies in North America: BYU and Univ. of Victoria.

$125

Cocktail

Guerrico, Silvia. Cocktail (Para el atardecer de un sábado inglés): Cuentos Breves. Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor, 1932. First edition. 18.5 cm, 157 pp.; textblock toned with foxing, stories followed by five pages of publicity and press blurbs about Guerrico and an index. Color wrapper with illustration by Luis Macaya (1888-1953), older glue repairs to spine. With signed manuscript dedication from the author to Mané Bernardo on half-title, and a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the author, accompanied by a second handwritten note from Guerrico to Bernardo, both laid in. Note reads “A Mane Bernardo, amiga muy querida, en el atardecer de este sábado inglés en que la alegría de todas hizo editar un segundo cocktail. Cariñosamente. Silvia.” Together with a signed copy of: Guerrico, Silvia. Los príncipes azules. Montevideo: Rossi, 1927. First edition. 20 cm, 139, [5] pp.; in color illus. glued wrapper, illustration by Mario Castellanos. Losses to wrappers, spine, and interior chipped and toned. Reading copy only. Signed dedication by the author on half-title to the poet Fermín Estrella Gutiérrez.

Important association copies of early short stories by radio star Silvia Guerrico (Uruguay, 1905-1983), whose daily program in Buenos Aires became one of the most popular primetime shows in Rio Plata during the medium’s golden-age. Guerrico began her career as a theater critic in Montevideo, where she published Los príncipes azules (Prince charmings) when she was just 22. The collection was well-received by her contemporaries, including Juana de Ibarborou and Blanca Luz Brum. Brum wrote that “since she lives her life touching the painful and burning things, she could very well be a ‘little Russian’ in our literature [otherwise] prostituted by pornography and gauchismo.” (From publicity blurb in Cocktail, p. 157.)

Guerrico moved to Buenos Aires in 1928, where she shifted back and forth between print (incl. a regular newspaper column) and the radio, starting her own “magazine” program in late 1930. This quickly evolved into a daily broadcast called Cartel sonoro featuring many of her own poems and radio plays. Cartel sonoro was part of a wider effort to attract female audiences and consumers to variety shows and narrative programming. By the age of twenty-seven, Guerrico’s program had become a primetime success and an important platform for other women journalists and writers.

Despite her popularity, she was regularly criticized for the “vulgarity” and “femininity” of her on-air persona. Her rise corresponded to a new era of celebrity in Argentinian radio, and the government was just catching up to conservative concerns about the immorality of radio programming and modern music (particularly tango). It was during this period that she wrote the stories in Cocktail, which, like Los Principes Azules, depict modern women drinking and dancing and men who exploit and violate them. In Guerrico’s telling, the only exceptions to this dynamic are men and women of strong moral character brave enough to stand up for themselves. Guerrico’s playful dedication of Cocktail to her “dear friend” the lesbian puppeteer Mané Bernando conjures an intimate world of artist party-going on the “English Saturday”, i.e. the newly created legal right to a half-day off on Saturdays.

The cover illustration of Cocktail reflects the place tango had come to occupy in the Argentinian popular imagination. Associated in the 1930s with violence, the lower classes, and urban areas where prostitution was legal, the racist components of the image were part of the public association of tango with Afro-Argentinian traditions (“tango” and “tambo” were probably initially used to refer to musical gatherings of enslaved people in the Rio Plata).

Rare despite Guerrico’s fame: two copies listed by WorldCat for Cocktail; approx. 6 for Los príncipes. None in modern sales records.

SOLD

Further historical notes on Guerrico and censorship against women:

In 1933, shortly after Cocktail’s publication, Argentina passed laws to limit political speech on the radio and censor tango lyrics. In the spring of 1934, Guerrico interviewed Mexican film star Ramon Navarro for the evening news. Apologizing for recent poor reviews of his local performances, she offered him an impassioned defense that was the start of what became known as the “Guerrico affair”:

“I am going to say to you [...] what women would [say] if nobody was listening, if the mocking gaze of men did not weigh upon them, injuring and humiliating them. . . . Women love you, and there isn’t one who would not [like to say] thank you [...]. For an hour, from whatever movie screen in the world, you have …. erased all realities . . . there were no women who worked like dogs and had to marry some pimple-faced guy; there were no women who waited for the rough kiss of a dirty husband; there were no women overloaded with sadness and children. . . . Men have made life very difficult for women. And day-by-day, they make it uglier.”

Despite the seemingly low-stakes context of a radio interview, the speech’s implications about women’s desire, fantasy, and social silence surrounding their ordinary suffering was incendiary. The radio press called for government investigations. They questioned Guerrico’s qualifications, and women’s more generally, to speak. When she was not immediately fired they criticized her for having dared to “speak for Argentinian women” and described her as a “true threat to the tranquility of the radio listener.” One aggrieved reviewer wrote that Guerrico had proved “women and a microphone are incompatible.” Later that year, there was an executive degree with strict radio regulations to curb offensive content, a move that mirrored the new Hollywood industry guidelines known as the Hays Code. Eventually Guerrico was fired.

She found her way again with a more conservative radio program in the mid-1940s but went into exile after Perón’s election in 1946. After a number of years in Mexico, she eventually settled back in Uruguay.

Cited:

Ehrick, Christine. Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 33-69.

Collection of 140 Argentinian Women Artists’ Exhibition Announcements and Catalogs

Collection of 140 Argentinian Women Artists’ Exhibition Announcements and Catalogs, 1946-2008.

Substantial collection of illustrated ephemera documenting women artist exhibitions in Argentina (artists primarily identifying as Argentinian, with a few expatriates or Central and South American artists showing in Argentina). Spanning a period of more than 50 years and various stylistic movements, the bulk of the exhibitions date from 1965-1985, an era of increasing participation by women artists in the Buenos Aires art world.

The collection includes numerous examples from vanguard Argentinian gallery programs, including Arthea, Peuser, Rubbers, and Witcomb. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Julia Codesido, Diana Dowek, Ana Eckell, Magda Frank, Raquel Forner, María Martorell, etc.) the majority of the 100+ artists are relatively unknown to North American collections and institutions; most of the catalogues are seemingly unrecorded in relevant databases. Almost all of the items provide biographical detail with a list of works, many have essays by well-known critics and historians. Taken together they offer a wealth of new information about women artists in Argentina: their art education (often listed as autodidacta); their careers; their artistic processes.

Short-title list provided on request.

$2800

Maria Fuentealba

Montecino, Sergio, Intro. Maria Fuentealba. Exh. cat., Instituto de Extensión De Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Londres, nd. [1964]. Square 16 cm, [10] pp. followed by [7] b/w plates; stapled wrappers with reproduction of sculpture verso, wrapper a bit rubbed with light wear, interior VG+. Photos by Luis Ladrón de Guevara (1926-2015)?

The only? exhibition catalogue documenting the work of mid-century Chilean sculptor Maria Fuentealaba (1914-1963). Fuentealba was a professor of sculpture with a promising career when she died in 1963 at the age of 49. She exhibited and won prizes at annual national salons, and at the first Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna, in São Paulo, in 1951. Her work is in the Collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago. The booklet is a posthumous celebration of her work with an essay by artist and critic Sergio Montecino.

OCLC records one copy at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (listed twice), none in North America.

$125

Five Mexican Gay Liberation Movement Magazines

Five Mexican Gay Liberation Movement Magazines, 1989-1992.

Examples celebrating LGBT+ culture in Mexico at the height of the AIDS (SIDA) crisis: a period in which persecution and violence against gay and lesbian people in Mexico was still common (especially the murder of transsexuals and transvestites).

Comprised of:

41 soñar fantasmas: Información Gay lésbica. Núm 1. Mexico, D.F.: Centro de Información y Documentación de las Homosexualidades en México “Ignacio Alvarez” (CIDHOM) del Colectivo Sol, A.C., 1992. Large format, 34 cm, 32 pp.; profusely illustrated; in stapled color wrappers, lightly worn. Includes articles on SIDA, safe sex, personal ads, and coverage of the 1992 CMDX Pride parade in a color centerfold.

Macho Tips. Numero 22. Mexico, D.F.: Macho International, 1989.

Hermes. Números. 1-3. Mexico, D.F.: Febo Editores, 1990-1991. 23 cm, each 76 pp.; profusely illustrated. Stapled color pictorial wrappers. Three runs listed in OCLC, Cornell, Texas A&M, and ONE/UCLA. ONE Archives records seem to indicate a second iteration under the same title, published between 1992-1994.

$300

Magdalena y Aurora Mira

Carvacho Herrera, Victor. Magdalena y Aurora Mira. Santiago de Chile: np, 1953. 26.5 cm, 22, [1], pp.; booklet toned, followed by 14 b/w plates from photographs by Rene Combeau mounted to card with captions identifying the location of the work, in addition to the normal data; plates loose, in orig. paper wrapper with portrait tipped-in, wrapper worn and splitting, old repair on verso not visible recto. Edition limited to 100 copies, this copy no. 95. Extra-illustrated?

The earliest monographic study of the Chilean painters Magdalena (1859-1930) and Aurora (1863-1939) Mira, published to coincide with a privately organized exhibition of their work in their family house in Santiago.

The sisters were from a socially prominent family; their father was an artist who helped them gain admittance to the Chilean Painting Academy. Magdalena and Aurora were two of the first women to study painting in Chile at the national academy, and their skill was recognized during their lifetimes with a number of medals at national salons in the 1880s and 1890s. Despite these early successes, both women ultimately prioritized domestic lives and rarely exhibited after 1895. Their story is emblematic of the changing opportunities and limits faced by upper class Chilean women in the late 19th century.

This midcentury study is an important object of the history of their reception in Chile. Now celebrated in Chile as “pioneering” women artists, the next major monograph of their work, Magdalena y Aurora Mira: Pioneras del Arte Femenino, was not published until 2013.

OCLC finds two copies of the portfolio, at UConn and Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, both local catalogs reference 10 plates. The present copy has 14.

$550

La Mujer Proletaria: Poemas Escolares

Basurto, Carmen. La Mujer Proletaria: Poemas Escolares. [Mexico, D.F.] Mixcoac: np, 1935. 19 cm, 21, (3), pp.; poems, index, and advertisement for Basurto’s previous booklet “Alborada”, two sheets laid-in, printed recto only, each with a poem: “La Mujer Proletaria” (not otherwise printed in the booklet), and an homage to Palma Guillen, Mexico’s first female ambassador, appointed in 1935; in stapled pictorial wrapper, very small stain at foredge, illustrated by Enrique Galindo, with printed flaps. Signed by the author in ink with dedication to the feminist Leonor Llach on the “dedicatoria” page.

Basurto was a teacher and poet. She wrote a number of books and plays for children and was an advocate for the education of women and girls. The present work reflects the hope of many feminists following the election of President Lazaro Cardenas and his promises of labor reform and women’s civil rights. The title poem voices the suffering and danger of uneducated women, and of women in the workplace, exposed to the “malintentions” of their male bosses.

From the library of Leonor Llach, a writer who published on labor and women’s rights, including suffrage, education, domestic subordination, occupational segregation, and the yoke of traditional femininity. She was involved in the women’s organization of the PRI and was director of the library at the Ministry of Public Education (SEP).

Three copies described in OCLC: BNM, UCLA, and Univ. of Ill. None mention the additional sheets.

$350

Cantar Juvenil. Año I, Núm. 2-3

Juventudes Comunistas de Chile. Cantar Juvenil. Año I, Núm. 2-3. Santiago de Chile: np, 1975. Approx. 22 cm, 4; 12 pp.; mimeographed poems on folded sheets, somewhat toned, in color silkscreen wrappers (year and number added by hand in ink), colors bright, num. 3 with ghost of recto on verso where they were presumably stacked after printing. Núm. 2 with two versions of the orig. 4 pp. folded sheet, changes have been made to the mimeo stencil. Together with a duplicate of num. 3, incomplete.

The Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) was outlawed in 1973, following the deposition of the Allende government in the coup d’etat by Augusto Pinochet. This clandestine poetry serial was published by the youth wing of the party: poems are signed with pseudonyms unless they are by recognized poets, i.e. Pablo Neruda (a PCCh member before his controversial death in 1973). The third issue with more ideological text (quotes from Hegel, Stendahl, and Deznos [sic], etc.).

Pagination and folding are irregular. The distinctive wrappers with artifacts of their handmade production (i.e. ink smears). Cover image of Victor Jara’s guitar?

Unlikely survivors. No records in OCLC.

$550

Flores en el desierto: Mujeres del Concejo Indígena de Gobierno

Muñoz Ramírez, Gloria. Flores en el desierto: Mujeres del Concejo Indígena de Gobierno. Mexico: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung; Desinforémonos, 2018. Square, 22 cm, 175 pp.; profusely illustrated with color reproductions of photographs; color pictorial boards, extremities lightly rubbed, VG.

Interviews and photographs of ten women members of the Indigenous Government Council (Concejo Indígena de Gobierno [CIG]), a political body created in 2016 by the National Indigenous Congress (Council Congreso Nacional Indígena [CNI]) to be a collective indigenous voice united with the EZLN behind a single candidate for the Mexican presidency during the 2018 elections. The chosen candidate, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, is a Nahua doctor, the CIG spokesperson, and the final interviewee in the present volume.

The book presents the striking stories of these women resistance leaders as they fight racism and the colonial legacy of dispossession to defend their history, language, natural resources, and sacred lands and ceremonies from “la hidra capitalista [que] avanza y avoraza todo lo que está a su alcance.”

The CIG/CNI’s governing principles are anticapitalist, autonomous, and horizontal: “Servir y no servirse, construir y no destruir, obedecer y no mandar, proponer y no imponer, convencer y no vencer, bajar y no subir, representar y no suplantar.”

A book produced intentionally in the public domain, unrecorded in OCLC either in physical or digital formats.

SOLD

Semblanza de la mujer mexicana y su participación en el movimiento obrero [...]

Becerril de Beltran, Graciana. Semblanza de la mujer mexicana y su participación en el movimiento obrero: Conferencia sustentada en el primer seminario interamericano de capacitación para la mujer trabajadora …. Mexico, D.F.: np, 961. 23 cm. 33 pp.; 4 b/w pls. from photographs, paper toned, small ink notations on p. 13, in stapled wrappers, a bit dogeared and chipped, with small loss at upper corner of front wrap.

Booklet reproduces a lecture on the history of Mexican women’s labor given by Graciana Becerril de Beltran, the secretary of labor relations at the Federacion Obrera de Organizaciones Femeniles de La República de Mexico (FOOF) at a training seminar for working women. Becerril de Beltran begins with a few names from precolonial history (Xochitl etc.), and continues through the colonial period, independence, the revolution, and into the present. She stresses the importance of the worker’s movement and union organizing to the recently successful suffrage movement and female education.

The four introductory plates reproduce photographs of Eva Sámano de López Mateo (first lady of Mexico); Fidel Velázquez (Secretary General of the Confederación de Trabajadores de Mexico); the author, and Hilda Anderson Nevarez (Secretary General of FOOF). Includes an introduction by Anderson Nevarez.

As far as we can determine, otherwise unrecorded.

$125

La Mujer y su Expresión

Ocampo, Victoria. La Mujer y su Expresión. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1936. First edition. 21.5 cm, 67 pp.; small dampstain at upper fore edge, pages largely unopened; signed and dated by the author in ink to author Alberto Gerchunoff on ffep, with shelf stamp (bookseller’s?) on same page; in orig. green paper wrappers, worn, corners bumped, rear wrapper with small repair and a closed tear at rear hinge.

Signed first edition of a volume containing three of Victoria Ocampo’s first openly feminist essays. Ocampo was one of 20th-century Latin America’s most famous authors and intellectuals. In addition to her own writing, she was the founder and editor of Sur, the avantgarde literary magazine closely associated with Borges and his circle.

The present book Includes the ground-breaking title essay, originally given during a radio broadcast conference in Argentina and Spain, which seeks an autonomous feminine expression or language. Anticipating so many later philosophers, including Cixous, Ocampo described the constraints of “masculine” forms and styles and the futility of trying to write within them. She wrote: “El monólogo del hombre no me alivia ni de mis sufrimientos, ni de mis pensamientos. ¿Por qué he de resignarme a repetirlo? Tengo otra cosa que expresar. Otros sentimientos, otros dolores han destrozado mi vida, otras alegrías la han iluminado desde hace siglos.”

The final essay, “La mujer, sus derechos y sus responsabilidades,” directly addresses the evolving fight for women’s civil rights in Argentina and abroad.

$550

Cuentos para Mari-Sol

Brunet, Marta. Maria Valencia, Illus. Cuentos para Mari-Sol. Santiago de Chile: Zig Zag, nd. (1938?). First edition. 25.2 cm, 49, [1], pp.; letterpress? with four-color halftone title page and five four-color halftone plates, additional in-text color halftone illus. throughout; each of the seven stories beginning with a historiated initial “R” (“Resulta que…”); the page numbers with changing ornamental surrounds corresponding to the different stories. Text block clean and uniformly toned, colors bright with some ghosting/bleedthrough from the inking of the color illustrations. Orig. stapled card stock boards, rebacked, with orig. color illustrated wrapper, stained and reinforced at edges and spine where there were small losses, Brunet/Valencia “ex-libris” design on the rear wrapper.

First edition of the beloved mid-century Chilean children’s book, Cuentos para Mari-Sol. Authored by the award-winning novelist Marta Brunet (1897-1967) and the only edition with exuberant color illustrations by Maria Valencia, one of four participants in the groundbreaking neocubist Exposición de Diciembre (often described as the first abstract art exhibition in Chile). Known from a single other copy, at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (BNC), the first edition seems to have been rarely consulted by most Brunet bibliographers, who do not fully differentiate it from all subsequent editions. One of the seven stories appearing in the first edition is missing from all others, and the second edition, published approximately 25-30 years later, was much enlarged, including an additional thirteen stories (Los Cuentos de Mama Tolita) written many years after the original Cuentos para Mari-Sol.

Brunet was a feminist novelist, one of the earliest Latin American women writers who were not “simply displaying the ways in which women have been subordinated and excluded from the conventional social contract” but actually imagining “alternative social arrangements not based on fixed gender identities or conventional gender roles.” She was deeply involved in the Chilean suffrage movement, and her writing “violated in particular the limits of a rigidly class-based society, attacking ‘good customs’ (...) The demand for boldness in the behavior of women linked to the rise of the suffrage movement included above all the use of language.”

Both Brunet and Valencia had traveled to Europe in the 1910s and 1920s and were known for their participation in avant-garde intellectual circles there and in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. In addition to their involvement in the suffrage movement, they were also involved in Chilenidad and Americanismo, which prioritized local and indigenous references and expressions. Gabriela Mistral wrote of Brunet: “se ha amamantado de chilenidad. Chilenidad de paisaje, de acento, de costumbre, de carácter.” Cuentos de Mari-Sol is an example of Brunet’s early, rural chilenidad: familiar tropes of children’s folktales placed in a Chilean context (e.g. a protagonist condor; and the landscapes of Chile, rather than Europe). After Mistral, Brunet was the second woman to receive the National Prize for Literature, in 1961.

We offer the approximate date of 1938 for this edition because Valencia’s distinctive cover image is visible in a famous photograph taken of Brunet in that year (photograph in the collection of the BNC). Various bibliographies offer different dates, ranging from 1934 in Marting’s Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic Source Book, to 1941 by the BNC.

$3500

Works cited:

Mistral, Gabriela. “Sobre Marta Brunet.” El Mercurio. July 8, 1929.

Oyarzún, Kemy. “Género y canon: la escritura de Marta Brunet.” Revista de la facultad de filosofía y humanidades, Universidad de Chile. No. 14. 2000.

Pignatello Regenstreif, Ellen G.  Power, sexuality and the new social contract: Five twentieth century Latin American novels. Diss., Stanford University, 1994.

La Hora de Queda: Novelas Cortas

[Echeverría Bello, Inés]. Iris. La Hora de Queda: Novelas Cortas. Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria, 1918. First edition. 19 cm, 223 pp.; signed manuscript dedication from the author to “mi amigo Mario …” on ffep, brittle paper chipped and toned, in pictorial wrapper with nouveau cover design by Laureano Guevara Romero, soiled, with small water stain verso, spine repaired with losses.

Inés Echeverría Bello (1868-1949) was a Chilean author who published under the pseudonym “Iris”. This collection of six short stories was her fifth book. Literary critic Elvira Santa Cruz Ossa (1886-1960) reviewed La Hora de Queda psuedoymously in Zig Zag. She praised the stories, deeply influenced by the spiritualist movement, for their description of the “repetitive and confined” life of the upper class woman, in which “neither ‘freedom of thought’ nor the ‘right to reason for themselves’ were present.” Santa Cruz Ossa also wrote that this monotony revealed the urgency of progressive (feminist) ideas: “[existía un] abismo entre aquel ambiente femenino de la ‘Hora de queda’ y el de la hora presente”, “abismo que comienza a llenarse con el sacrificio de algunas, con la valentía de muchas, con la rebelión callada y vibrante de todas… Abismo que va llenándole el heroísmo de las que enarbolan el estandarte de ideas progresistas en medio del escarnio de timoratos y retrógrados.”

Echeverría Bello is generally acknowledged as one of Chile’s early feminists, for her work founding the women’s intellectual salons, The Reading Club and The Ladies Club, and for her passionate advocacy against domestic violence following the murder of her daughter Rebeca by Rebeca’s husband, Roberto Barceló (1934).

Cited: [Santa Cruz Ossa, Elvira]. Roxane. “Al margen de la hora de queda”. Zig-Zag. Número 699, Santiago, 13 de julio de 1918.

$275

Los misterios desvelados [sic]; tratados de quirognomia; el árbol del ocultismo [...]

Moraima Gelo, Zulema. Los misterios desvelados [sic]; tratados de quirognomia; el árbol del ocultismo; la luz en el sendero. Mexico, D.F.: np, 1929. 18.5 cm, 92 pp.; frontispiece portrait and 3 b/w pls., minor area of faded color pencil underlining on p. 34; in contemporary half calf, spine with gilt lettering, heavily rubbed, lacking orig. wrapper? Manuscript signature and dedication on verso of half-title by the author to Arthur Garcia (with his ex-libris stamp).

Zulema Moraima Gelo, born Maria Ciriaca Resendis, was a glamorous fortune teller and chirologist in Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s. She claimed to be of “African Moorish” descent; her exoticized stage name, taken from a contemporary opera, reflects the popularity of Orientalism in literature and art of the period. Although divination and cartomancy would have been a common aspect of certain theatrical and public performances in Mexico in the 19th century, fortune tellers with fixed addresses and private rooms emerged only slowly in the early 20th. Initially they requested municipal authorization for their businesses, but by 1919, when Zulema applied for permission, the Mexico City had turned against fortune telling and created a policy not only to refuse new licenses, but to withdraw those which had been granted, and to prosecute fortune tellers and cartomancers as frauds.

Zulema therefore moved her studio frequently, and circulated in sympathetic artistic and intellectual circles where spiritualism was admired (she was praised by the poet Jose Emilio Pacheco as “our maximal visionary”). Unfortunately today she is mostly remembered for a series of public scandals involving her romantic life and deceptive business practices.

The present volume appeared during the height of her fame, when she toured to Havana as an “Arab clairvoyant” and correctly predicted political and global events (the Spanish Flu, the death of a local politician). It offers personal interpretation and instruction on familiar conventions of palmistry and divination. Seemingly issued in very limited numbers, OCLC identifying only one copy, at the Biblioteca Nacional de México.

$450

See: Avilés, M. M. (2017). La suerte está echada. Clarividentes, adivinadoras, palmistas y cartomancianas. Alquimia 61.

Cultura Doméstica; Cultura Femenina (all published)

(Feminism) [Karr, Carme, aka Carmen Karr] Cultura Doméstica: Revista Mensual de [...] las Diversas Ramas de la Vida Familiar. Año I, Núm 1-18; followed by Cultura Femenina: Revista Mensual Ilustrada de la Mujer y el Hogar. Año III, Núm 19-24 (all published). 26.8 cm, annual continuous pagination (122, 182, and 96 pp. respectively); illustrated women’s serial with texts in both Castilian and Catalan, bound in single cloth volume, lacking orig. wrappers. Barcelona: 1933-1935.

Uncommon Spanish Republican women’s serial directed by the Catalonian feminist and journalist, Carme Karr, who wrote for and edited some of Spain’s earliest feminist publications, including the magazines Feminal and Or y Grana. Women were granted suffrage in Spain in 1931 (and were elected to office that same year), but the could not actually participate in elections until November 1933, shortly after the origination Cultural Doméstica.

The serial documents the early days of this brief moment in Spanish women’s history (roughly 1931-1939), when new freedoms and roles were possible. This period lasted until the Republican defeat in the Civil War ushered in a new era of tradition and oppression. Along with monthly columns on women’s issues and news by Karr (e.g. “La mission social de la mujer en la vida moderna,” the magazine carried regular features on girl’s education, women at work and job training, medicine and family health, cooking, fashion, applied arts and interior design, all with an emphasis on modern styles, particularly German. Contributions by or articles on artists and authors including Elvira August Lewi, Margarita Sans Jordi, Margarita Xirgu, Anna Casanovas (book binder), Maria Teresa Vernet, Enriqueta Pascual Benigani, and the fashion houses Pedro Rodriguez and El Dique Flotante.

OCLC records one holding, in Barcelona.

$550

El Espacio Escultórico

(Land Art) (Abstract art) (Mexico)

Centro de Investigación y Servicios Museológicos, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. El Espacio Escultórico. Mexico, D.F.: UNAM, 1980. 21.7 cm, 119 pp.; trilingual catalogue, profusely illus. in b/w, thumbed, with crease at fore corner affecting early pages; in color wrappers worn with creases, starting to separate at foot of spine, small chip in rear wrap.

This volume was the first and only monographic publication to document UNAM’s instantly recognizable, massive sculpture park. The park was one of Mexico’s most important public art projects in the second half of the 20th century. Conceived of by artist Federico Silva, the monumental works by Silva, Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Matías Goeritz, Hersúa, and Sebastián respond to the extraordinary volcanic landscape of the surrounding ecological reserve incorporating elements of Land Art, pre-Hispanic imagery, and immersive geometric abstraction. The volume documents its planning, construction, and completion, including images of the architectural, archeological, and geological context of the site, the inauguration of the space, and the sculptures; together with artist biographies, artistic statements, and other short essays, followed by translations to English and French.

The colophon claims an edition of 3000. OCLC records fewer than 10 in public US collections, almost all museum libraries.

$550

Bajo las garras de la gestapo: 36 días en capilla

Romero Giménez, Carlos. Lizarraga Istúriz, Gerardo, Illus. Bajo las garras de la gestapo: 36 días en capilla. México, D.F.: Sociedad Mexicana de Publicaciones, 1943. 20 cm, 247, [6], pp.; text block toned, in orig. Illus. color wrappers by Lizarraga, frayed and discolored.

Romero Giménez was a leader of the Spanish Republican army during the Civil War, and a hero of the Defense of Madrid. At the end of the war he fled and was tried in absentia by Franco’s new government and twice sentenced to death. He first went to France where he played a leading role in the French Resistance; after his arrest and torture by the Germans he narrowly escaped the eastern death camps by the intervention of a Mexican diplomat who rescued him and his family from the Gurs concentration camp.

From 1942 until his death, he lived as an exile in Mexico, where he founded the publishing house that produced this memoir of his time in Bordeaux, his torture in the Gestapo prison at “Fort du Ha”, his escape, his recapture, and his journey from Gurs to Casablanca and finally, Mexico.

Illustrated by another Republican in exile, the antifascist organizer Gerardo Lizarraga, Remedios Varo’s ex-husband.

OCLC finds two US holdings: Harvard and LOC.

$250

[1959 Dragon Yearbook]

[1959 Dragon Yearbook]. Warren, PA: Warren High School, 1959. Yearbook, 27.2 cm, 144 pp.; reproductions of b/w photos throughout; blue embossed cloth, lightly worn, small stain recto. Spine starting, pastedowns fragile at hinge.

Yearbook of Warren High School, attended in 1959 by German exchange student Gudrun Ensslin, who would go on to co-found and lead the Rote Armee Fraktion, the notorious far-left militant group (sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Group).

Like the other RAF members, including her romantic partner, Andreas Baader, she was an excellent student before her radicalization and provided the intellectual framework for many of the RAF’s actions.

Ensslin is listed as a participant in Future Teachers of America, German Club, Orchestra, Student Council, Latin Club, and the National Honor Society. She appears at least five times (pp. 40, 52, 57, 122, and 136) and we believe can be identified in a sixth (p. 43) pledging allegiance with a larger group of students.

A fascinating artifact of one of the postwar period’s most visible proponents of political violence. She argued against the capitalist, imperialist policies of Western Europe and the US, which she had experienced first hand as an exchange student at Warren. The RAF was involved in numerous bombings and hostage situations; Ensslin was one of several members charged with murder and sentenced to life in prison. She died there under mysterious circumstances (in the same evening as two other RAF members) in what became known as the “Death Night.”

Four Artists’ Books

Four Artists’ Books by Ediciones Vigia, 1990-1997. Early and uncommon examples from the famed Cuban artists’ book collective, a collaboration between artist Rolando Estévez and poet Alftedo Zaldivar. Each book is assembled by hand and includes hand coloring, found and recycled materials, and collaged elements.

Composed of:

Burgos, Julieta and Camilo Venegas Yero, C, Illus. Los Reyes Illuminados. Matanzas, Cuba: Ediciones Vigía. 1990. 16 x 17.5 cm, 18 pp.; toned, profusely illus. with some hand coloring; tied with brown cord, collaged wrappers, wrappers with minor closed splitting on top edges. Signed by Burgos. No. 53.

2 OCLC holdings: Univ. Miami and Notre Dame, as of December 2022 no others on the market.

Venegas Yero, Camilo. La venta de miel. Matanzas, Cuba: Ediciones Vigía, 1997. 2-.5 x 16 cm, [18] pp.; mimeograph with handwritten titles, stamps, collage elements; tied with brown string, pictorial front wrapper with collage elements. No. 103 (out of 200?).

1 OCLC holding: Univ. of Miami. As of December 2022 no others on the market.

Mendez, Roberto. Cena en casa de Levi, A.D . 1573. Matanzas, Cuba: Ediciones Vigía, 1990. Poem printed on four brown paper sheets, glued vertically to form a continuous single sheet, folded seven times and tied with a paper handle at head. Front panel with hand coloring. No. 139/200. Illustration and design by Rolando Estévez.

2 OCLC holdings: Univ. of Miami, Univ. of Utah. As of December 2022 no others on the market.

[Alcaeus] Ferraté, Juan y María Eugenia Alegría. Untitled [Alceo]. Matanzas, Cuba: Ediciones Vigía, n.d. ca. 1990s. 19.5 x 15 cm, [10] pp.; reproducing 3 poems by Alcaeus in Spanish with original Greek on facing page, followed by bibliography. No. 47. Illustration and design by Rolando Estévez. There appear to be two editions with different pictorial wrappers. The other edition is titled “Hablar de poesia”.

3 OCLC holdings: Univ. of Miami, Notre Dame, UC-Berkeley..

Nota Roja: 27 Vintage Photos of Crimes and Accidents

Nota Roja: 27 Vintage Photos of Crimes and Accidents. [Yucatán, Mexico]: n.d., ca. 1970-1980. Vintage prints, sizes vary slightly, most approx. 13 x 9 cm. Slight curling, a few faded, overall VG+.
This collection presents 27 characteristic examples of Mexico’s nota roja photojournalism in Yucatán, possibly Merída. Nota roja is a genre of sensationalist, violent crime journalism central to Mexico’s tabloid press since the 1950s.

The group documents car crashes, murders, arrests, fires, crime scenes, bodies in the streets with curious crowds, and the death of a woman carrying a Confederación Nacional Campesina flag, presumably attacked during a demonstration.

The ubiquitous public display and consumption of such graphic imagery is often explained in relation to an emerging modern Mexican popular culture and national identity in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Some scholars have resisted the characterization of the nota roja as dehumanizing, writing instead about its reparative force: a public forum against political and institutional corruption. But the escalation of drug trafficking violence in Mexico, and the popularity of cultural forms which celebrate or romanticize this violence (tv shows; corridos; etc.), over the last twenty years has brought renewed criticism of nota roja style and its role in normalizing violence and spreading fear and apathy.

Vintage examples of a controversial photographic genre whose history and cultural importance remain central to contemporary conversations about violence in Mexico and Mexican popular culture.

$350

Allegorical Map of Mexico City and Environs

(Pictorial Cartography) Herrmann, Carlos. Allegorical Map of Mexico City and Environs. Mexico, D.F.: n.d, ca. 1930-1935. 63.5 x 92.3 cm. Image very good, blind margins a bit worn, beginning to fray.

A pictorial map of Mexico City, representing the natural, industrial, architectural, and cultural landmarks of the city. The artist blends indigenous styles and historical references with colonial and postcolonial features, identifying the key features of Mexico’s emerging modern national identity.

Probably printed in the 1930s during the Maximato, when as Delia Cosentino has argued, “the production, circulation, and consumption of such imagery offered the opportunity to imagine a uniquely animated geography coming into its own … [C]artography, [was] an advantageous way to shape the view of Mexico as a cohesive entity with a rapidly developing infrastructure and an evolving relationship with its own Indigenous past and present. [...]. Through these images dating to the first half of the 1930s, an international cadre of artists, travelers, publishers, government officials, and other boosters disseminated an integrated vision of Mexican cultural space and thereby coproduced the territory itself.” (1)

Known from a single other example, in the David Rumsey Map Collection.

$950

Notes:

1. Delia Cosentino. “Unfolding Maps during the Maximato in Mexico,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1.1 (January 2019).

Ricardo Aldape Guerra: ¡Condenado a muerte!

(Criminal Justice) (Wrongful Convictions) (Illegal Immigration) Jaubert, Sergio. Ricardo Aldape Guerra: ¡Condenado a muerte! Por un incidente de tránsito. Mexico: Edamex, 1989. 17 cm, 121 pp.; with b/w illus; pictorial wrapper.

Mexican criminologist Sergio Jaubert’s book was the first significant challenge to the wrongful conviction and death penalty for illegal immigrant Ricardo Aldape, found guilty of killing a Houston cop in 1982. Aldape’s eventual exoneration (1997) confirmed many of Jaubert’s theories about the biases and false evidence presented during the trial. The case became a landmark of what the judge called “outrageous” police misconduct; the jury was allowed to consider his status as an illegal immigrant during sentencing.

Aldape became a folk hero and the subject of corridos, novelas, and soap operas upon his return to Mexico, but he died in a car accident only four months later.

Jaubert’s book is profusely illustrated with evidence (photographic, ballistic, etc.) presented at the trial, with his own annotations and interpretations. Fewer than 10 physical holdings recorded in OCLC.

$225

La lucha política de las mujeres

Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Económicos y Sociales; Inter-American Commission of Women; Partido Revolucionario Institucional. La lucha política de las mujeres. México, D.F.: PRI, IEPES, 1990. 28 cm, 79 pp.; b/w illus. throughout, color pictorial wraps a bit rubbed with corner crease.

Highly politicized, propagandistic account of the women’s movement from the Revolution through suffrage (1952), emphasizing participation in the Revolution and achievements by individual women in government and agriculture (happy peasants!). Final brief section on post-1952 developments. No mention of the feminist struggles for additional civil and political liberties, voluntary motherhood, etc.

$90

Revista Mujeres Insurgentes

(Feminism) (Mexico) Pleites, Lidia, Ed. Revista Mujeres Insurgentes, No. 2. Mexico, D.F.: Federación Nacional de Mujeres Insurgentes, 1996. 28 cm, 15 pp.; color pictorial wraps. VG.

Curious feminist artifact of internecine Mexican political struggles in the 1990s, the short-lived magazine was allied with the controversial Partido Cardenista, which may have been a socalist-leaning front for the PRI in its electoral campaigns against the PRD.

Not recorded in OCLC.

$70

Mezzo cielo: Il giornale della lega delle donne comuniste italiane. Anno I, Nos. 1-2; Anno II, No. 1

(Women’s Liberation) (Communism) Lega delle donne comuniste italiane. Mezzo cielo: Il giornale della lega delle donne comuniste italiane. Anno I, Nos. 1-2; Anno II, No. 1. Milano: Lega delle donne comuniste italiane, 1973-1975. Three of six numbers, issued irregularly from late 1973-1975 (calling itself a trimestral). Sizes vary, tabloid to 4to. Illus throughout, incl b/w repros from photographs of events etc., also some comics, and original graphics. Stapled color pictorial wrappers. Inaugural issue with heavy center crease, rubbed. No. 2 (March 1974) closed tear on front cover.

Three issues (the first two together with the final number) of a well designed magazine professing women’s liberation through class struggle and labor emancipation. Articles on contemporary social issues and national events and strikes, in addition to reporting on “women’s issues” including health care, childcare, and education.

No OCLC holdings in North America, a few scattered issues in Europe, a single presumed complete run at IISH.

$425

Primo Congresso Nazionale, 26 27 Aprile 1919. Donne di Roma [...]

(Women’s Organizations) (WWI) (Mothers and Widows) Associazione Nazionale Fra Le Madri e Le Vedove Dei Caduti. Primo Congresso Nazionale, 26 27 Aprile 1919. Donne di Roma,—. Roma: Tip. Italiana di Pubblicità, 1919. Broadside, printed recto only, 98 x 67 cm, fragile at creases.

Early political organizing by Italian women in an impassioned announcement for the first congress of mothers and widows of the fallen soldiers of WWI. The gathering was not only to acknowledge the great personal losses of these women, but to form a “definitive structure” with which they hoped to address urgent civic and economic problems faced by those who had “given their blood and their love for the greatness of the sacred family … Italy!” The poster calls for “better state measures.”

Very little is written about this organization in the pre-fascist period, but the association continues to organize in the 1920s.

Not in OCLC.

$450

L’Opera Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia nel suo costante lavoro per la difesa [...]

(Women and Children) (Fascist Demographics) (Eugenics) Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternità ed Infanzia, Federazione Provinciale di Lucca. L’Opera Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia nel suo costante lavoro per la difesa ed il miglioramento della razza …. Lucca: Tip. Francesconi e Simonetti, 1933 [XI]. Broadside, printed recto only, 100 x 69.5 cm, a few small losses to edges, a few offset roller marks on right edge.

An impressive example from a public campaign in support of Mussolini’s “Battle for Births,” one of the pillars of his vision for Italian economic supremacy. His regime supported the demographic policy with financial incentives, including tax breaks and direct grants, like those described here, for large families and married couples. Conversely, Italians could be penalized for not having sufficient children–the ideal number was more than 5–or remaining unmarried. As signaled in this example by the proposed goal of “improving of the breed,” Italian pronatalist policies under Mussolini can be traced to the eugenics movement.

No other examples found in market or institutional holdings.

$450

Donne piemontesi nella lotta di liberazione 99 partigiane cadute, 185 deportate, 38 cadute civili

Gobetti, Ada, Intro. Donne piemontesi nella lotta di liberazione 99 partigiane cadute, 185 deportate, 38 cadute civili. Turin, Italy: Torino Commissione femminile dell’ A.N.P.I. provinciale di Torino, nd. [ca. 1945]. 24 cm, 103 pp.; many b/w portraits, wrappers darkened and a bit worn, small ink numeric notation on front cover.

Haunting commemoration of women partisans in the Italian Resistance, with portraits, personal testimony, extensive biographical details, information about individual service and military action, and battle recollections. Includes many reproductions of letters and clandestine flyers and newsletters by the women’s resistance groups Gruppi di defesa della donne and La Difesa della Lavoratrice, as well as the Corpo Volontari della Liberta. The list of deported women is mostly Jewish, and includes girls as young as 9.

OCLC lists North American holdings at Harvard, NYPL, and Princeton.

$350

Illustrated Autograph Album: El Frente de Juventudes Femenino a su Regidora Comarcal

(Education - Girls) (Fascism) [El Frente de Juventudes Femenino, Villanueva y Geltrú]. Illustrated Autograph Album: El Frente de Juventudes Femenino a su Regidora Comarcal. June 1943. Oblong 19.5 x 31 cm, 97 manuscript leaves; including approx. 90 pages individually executed by members of the Juventudes Femenino, approx. 90 with brightly colored pencil and pen drawings accompanying various inscriptions, poems, songs, and signatures; stab bound in brown faux-leather boards with leather thread, leather broken thus loosening the album, otherwise very good. With two leaves laid in, these two a bit frayed where they extended beyond the boards.

Unique illustrated gift album for Sra. Mercedes Rodriguez, a regional commander of the Falange Party’s Girls Youth Front, commemorating a political indoctrination summer camp focusing on home economics, physical education, religion, and social hygiene. During the Civil War, El Frente de Juventudes (like its fascist counterparts Hitlerjugend [Germany] and Balilla [Italy]) became an important part of securing a fascist future. Following the Nationalist victory, Franco made voluntary and involuntary state-sponsored youth organizations a priority of his new government, providing militarized style training for both boys and girls. Loosely based on scouting troops, the girls sections (“Margaritas” for 7-10 yr olds; “Flechas” for 10-18 yr olds) wore uniforms and practiced the songs and policies of the new Homeland.

Later superseded by the Juventudes de la Sección Femenina (1945), the Margaritas and Flechas of 1943 were being prepared to be good wives and mothers to the soldiers of Spain: in addition to domestic skills (sewing, nursing, cooking, etc.), they were encouraged to be physically fit, hygienic, churchgoers capable of teaching the core Falange values (Dios, Patria, Hogar) to the next generation.

In detailed drawings and inscriptions, the album documents the language and imagery of this indoctrination and its eerie combination of idealized femininity, children’s comics, and facist propaganda. Again and again Margaritas and Flechas announce their dedication to their beloved (“cariño”) commander, obedience to the political hierarchy of the Falange (“a tus ordenes”), and submission to the collective goals of national syndicalism. ¡Arriba España!

Despite its wide integration into girls education for more than thirty years, El Frente de Juventudes Femenino and the Juventudes de la Sección Femenina are poorly documented in North American institutions.

$2250

Vérascope, Taxiphote, Glyphoscope

(Trade Catalogue) (Photography) (WWI) Jules Richard. Vérascope, Taxiphote, Glyphoscope. Paris: [Jules Richard], 1918. 24 x 15 cm., 72 pp.; b/w illustrations throughout, light foxing to ffep, the rest of the interior quite bright with a few pages slightly foxed, lower stitch failing, two central sheets loosened. Embossed pictorial cover a bit soiled, faded office stamp on front cover.

WWI was a watershed moment in the relationship between photography and war. Although earlier wars were obviously photographed, the smaller cameras and new film formats available during WWI enabled combat photographers and soldiers themselves to take pictures of the war as it happened. Jules Richard was a second-generation instrument maker who entered the stereographic camera market in the early 1890s with the Vérascope, a compact camera known for its durability and innovative engineering. The first model was introduced in 1893 and it quickly became the bestselling stereograph camera of the period. The large Taxiphote viewer and storage cabinet was equally impressive in design, incorporating aspects of scientific instrumentation and clockmaking to create, according to the Oxford History of Science Museum “the most technically sophisticated” stereo viewer ever produced. It allowed a viewer to load up to 25 stereographs at the same time and then view them in any order. This extensive catalogue advertises these items and an exhaustive numner of accessories for the cameras, development, storage, and transport.

Richard was also known for his publicity. This example, issued during WWI, highlights the Vérascope’s suitability for war photography. More than half of the photographic illustrations in the catalogue are from the war, including images of soldiers and artillery in trenches, German flags at Invalides, “une boucherie sur le front,” a convoy of prisoners of war, troops in Alsace and Northern Africa, etc.

With tipped-in notice that the catalogue prices were established “according to pre-war manufacturing conditions” and in addition to possible price increases, the company “may need to suspend or stop the manufacture of certain items.”

Single holdings of other Jules Richard Vérascope catalogues found in OCLC, this one not recorded.

See: History of Science Museum, “Recent Acquisitions: Richard Verascope & Taxiphote,” Sphæra newsletter (Spring 1999).

$500

Eight Spanish Republican Women’s Groups’ Handbills and Flyers

(Anarcho-Feminism) (Guerra Civil) (Suffrage) (Songs) [Agrupación Mujeres Libres; La Secció Femenina del Bloc Obrer i Camperol; Las Agrupaciones Femeninas del Partido Radical, et al.]. Eight Republican Women’s Groups Handbills and Flyers, ca. 1934-1938. Np, nd. [Barcelona, Madrid, et al.]. Various sizes ranging from 31.5 x 22 to 16.5 x 16.5 cm; all but one printed recto only, fragile papers with minor fraying and small closed tears or nicks throughout. One green paper foxed. One illustrated, linocut?

Rare ephemera from various Republican women’s political organizations during the Spanish Second Republic and the Civil War, these handbills express outrage with the failures of certain political leaders and parties, and appeal to women to vote (as proletariat workers; domestic laborers, and mothers). Women’s suffrage was established in 1933; these examples attempt to enlist their support for the FAI and CNT, Catalonian Independence, and voluntary military service, among other issues.

One important sheet contains two coplas (folk songs) first published in the anarcho-feminist “Mujeres Libres” magazine: “El sambenito” and “Alto la Revolución.” These represent the complexity and despair of the counter-revolutionary movements building at the end of the Civil War.

None of the present examples are recorded in OCLC collections.

$1200

1a Exposició de Cartells [...] Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball

(Graphic Design) (Worker Safety) (Expositions) Generalitat de Catalunya, Conselleria de Treball; and Marti Bas, Illus. Calendar commemorating the 1a Exposició de Cartells Nacionals i Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball. Barcelona: 1937. 23.5 x 16.6 cm; 52 weekly calendar sheets printed recto, each sheet illustrating a different international worker safety poster with explanations of the dangers represented in each, in Catalan. Sheets loose, neatly removed from their original perforated(?) binding, the final week mounted to a heavier card stock, weeks 43 and 46 with small losses to blind top edge where removed from binding. Orig. color cover present, illus. by Marti Bas, lightly foxed on blank verso, not affecting recto. Together with a second calendar: Generalitat de Catalunya, Conselleria de Treball. [Croada de La Previsio 1937]: [Commemoració de la 1a Exposició de Cartells Nacionals i Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball…]. Barcelona: 1937. [Fotolitografia Barguño]. 11.4 x 7.7 cm. [8] pp., single sheet, tri-fold monthly calendar with 14 illus. Both VG+.

Appealing, otherwise unrecorded, artifacts of a graphic design exhibition organized during the Spanish Civil War by the Catalonian Ministry of Labor, probably in conjunction with the UGT (General Workers Union). The weekly calendar surveys 52 dramatic, often frightening, international accident prevention posters (incl. the workplace dangers of alcohol, electrical shocks; eye safety; braking; cranes, ladders, fire, slips and falls, heavy lifting, cables, scaffoldings, scalding, sharp tools, sewing machines, etc.). Examples drawn from safety campaigns in Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and the U.K. (Strange bedfellows given the political realities of many of these countries in January 1937!)

The safety posters themselves were probably the product of union efforts in individual countries, not necessarily by governmental organizations or propaganda offices. They underscore the dangerous and inhumane conditions that many laborers faced twenty years after the creation of the ILO in the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Occupational health and safety policy would not be nationally regulated in most of these countries for another thirty to forty years.

Cover illustration by artist Marti Bas, known for his work on other civil war-era posters and propaganda programs.

We are unable to find records of another copy of the weekly calendar in OCLC or market records, such as they are. The smaller, monthly calendar is known from other examples, but is also not listed in OCLC holdings.

$1750

Two Photographs of Anarchist Actions in Barcelona

(Anarchism) (Political Violence) Two Photographs. Barcelona: 1896 and 1902. One gelatin silver(?) print: 12 x 16.8 cm and one albumen print: 12.5 x 17.3 cm. Both mounted to heavier tan card, with substantial manuscript annotations recto, one stamped “Vista de Heridos y Demas Traumatismos / Del Hospital de la Sta. Cruz / Barcelona”. Verso with additional stamps and later annotations and signatures (by an administrator?) dated July 1906. Photos a bit worn, card on latter with some flaking and splitting, not affecting the image.

Scarce primary source documentation of early anarchist actions in Barcelona, a period of violent engagement that radicalized many Europeans. The earlier photograph documents 8 of the approx. 64 people wounded by the bombing of a Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona on June 7, 1896. Although no one claimed responsibility, municipal authorities and the police blamed militant anarchists and used the violence as a pretext to arrest and torture hundreds of anarchists and labor organizers, eventually sentencing five men to death at Montjuic. The real perpetrators were never found, and circumstantial evidence has led many to believe it was a false flag operation, since the bomb went off among the working-class crowd, rather than amongst the high-ranking politicians and church officials in the parade itself.

The second photograph documents wounded participants in Barcelona’s first general strike, in February 1902. The general strike evolved from an anarcho-syndicalist metal workers’ strike into a citywide work stoppage which eventually found working men and women, students, and the lower classes in pitched battles against the Spanish military. Hospital de la Santa Cruz was the destination for the strikers’ wounded and dead comrades.

$1500

La Protesta: Semanario de Batalla

(Nationalism) (Carlism) (Anti-Semitism) La Protesta: Semanario de Batalla. Radicalismo, Intransigencia, Nobleza, Sinceridad. Año I, Núm. 1. Barcelona, 1923. 49.6 x 34.5 cm, 4 pp., newsprint toned with creases at bifolds, small loss through full sheet at central crease, not affecting text.

First issue of an irregularly published radical monarchist (Carlist) paper, issued during the political crisis that led to General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s coup and dictatorship. Prefigures the cooperation of the Carlists with the fascists against the Second Republic with expressions of outrage against Spanish losses in Morocco, Catalan separatism, and the enemies of the “Sindicato Rojo” (the anarcho-syndicalist CNT etc.). Satirizes the campaign of a Jewish politician, Frederico Schwartz, and includes a brief panel on Schopenhauer’s fatal pessimism (but support of monarchism?).

Bold graphic design from the far-right. No copies of any issues in North America.

$325

Mirlitón: El Compañero de Juan

​Enriqueta, Maria [Camarillo]. Mirlitón: El Compañero de Juan. Madrid: Juan Pueyo, 1918. First Edition. 19.4, 232 pp.; some foxing, esp. in first quarter of text block; illus. color wrapper, worn and splitting at rear. Signed and dedicated by the author on ffep.

Maria Enriqueta Camarillo was a contributor to the proto-feminist Mexican journal La Mujer Mexicana (1904-1906). She was the author of a mandatory Mexican grammar school textbook and many volumes of popular children’s literature in Mexico. Miriltón was her first novel, preceding her well-known work El Secreto (1922), which was praised by Paul Valéry and selected by L’Académie française for a prize in 1923.

She also translated works from classic French literature and philosophy into Spanish.

$125

Alrededor de México: Vista en los carros especiales de La Compañía Limitada de Tranvías Eléctricos

(Mexico) (Tourism) (Railways) Compañía Limitada de Tranvías Eléctricos de Mexico. Alrededor de México: Vista en los carros especiales de La Compañía Limitada de Tranvías Eléctricos de México. Mexico, D.F.: La Compañía, 1907. Oblong 14.7cm, 37, [2], pp.; 13 b/w pls. with captions; stapled brown paper wrappers, a bit thumbed, printed with “Obsequio La Compañía Limitada de Tranvías Eléctricos de Mexico” recto, “Compliments of…” [same] verso. Very Good.

Bilingual, early guide to exploring Mexico City by rail on the special parlor car service of the Mexico Electric Tramway system. These special cars make two trips daily and will be accompanied by “competent” guides to describe the sights. “Every foot of ground covered in these trips is replete with a constantly changing panorama of historical interest, combined with pleasure and romance.” Detailed trip itineraries are listed with schedules. Special cars can also be chartered! Other electric and animal-driven tram lines listed with points of interest for the tourist.

Rare, a single holding listed in OCLC: UC-Berkeley.

$450

Eight Central and South American Tourist Pamphlets

Eight Central and South American Tourist Pamphlets, ca. 1950-1970. Most approx. 23 cm (folded), multi-fold single sheets with varying sizes, up to [24] pp., one stapled [20] pp. + folding map; Spanish except San Carlos Gran Hotel, Guatemala City, in Eng.; color illus., many with maps and or graphs, varying conditions, two with manuscript annotations inside and/or recto, overall about Good-.

Postwar graphic treatment promoting modern tourist experiences in Argentina (2), Brazil (1), Guatemala (1), Mexico (1), and Uruguay (3). Mexico pamphlet promoting a week-long festival of the Sociedad Cubano-Mexicana de Relaciones Culturales (1963). Uruguay pamphlet advertising social and public benefits systems as well as tourism.

$100

16 Cuban Tourist Pamphlets and Handbills

(Cuba) (Tourism) 16 Cuban Tourist Pamphlets and Handbills, ca. 1950-1983. Most approx. 23 cm (folded) multi-fold single sheets with up to [12] pp.; color illus., many with maps, varying conditions, two with manuscript annotations recto, overall about Good.

With an equal number of pre- and post-1959 examples, this small collection tracks the shifts in tourism that occurred in Cuba after the Revolution. Changes in marketing and activities focused on a largely European, rather than American, visitor, introducing a new emphasis on camping and nature (rather than hunting and clubbing). Examples from 1960-1983 published by the Instituto Nacional de la Industria Turística.

Includes a number of pamphlets for the Isla de Pinos/Isla de la Juventud, including two pre-1960 examples featuring the modernist new annex of the Hotel Santa Fe, now gone?

$400

Recuerdos de la Cuba que Dejamos

(Cuba) (Exile) Recuerdos de la Cuba que Dejamos [cover title]. Forest Hills, N.Y. : AZEFA Trading. Co., n.d. [1963? 1966?]. Oblong 23 cm, [24] pp.; bilingual color photobook, reproducing 79 images “in full natural color.” Stapled color wrappers, a bit worn, rubbed at spine.

Book memorializing midcentury Cuba before the Revolution. Spanish and English introductions are not the same, but both invoke a beloved “free” Cuba, the patriotism of Cubans living in exile in the US, and propose a “second liberation” that is close at hand.

Images focus on architectural and urban features with an emphasis on modern development before 1959. Possibly issued twice, or simultaneously, in Miami and New York.

Six OCLC holdings.

$125

Nine Photographs

Caballero, Antonio R. Nine Photographs, ca. 1965. Gelatin silver prints, six approx. 25.5 x 20.5 cm each; three approx. 17.5 x 12.6 cm each. All with studio stamp verso, some with editing marks verso or typed captions.

Antonio Caballero is recognized as a pioneer of the Mexican “fotonovela” genre; a narrative multi-image format published in various tabloids in the 1960s and 1970s that mirrored the style and melodramatic themes of telenovelas. In both a 2019 retrospective of his work at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, and a 2011 exhibition in New York, his photographs in the style of the present group were praised for a campy, vernacular style that riffed on Pop motifs and quintessential aspects of 60s aspirational Mexican bourgeois culture.

Caballero is also known for an infamous, explicit photograph of Marilyn Monroe, taken at the Mexico City Hilton in 1962, a few months before her death.

$1050

Untitled Photograph

García, Hector. Photograph, ca. 1955-1960. Gelatin silver print, 24 x 19.5 cm. Studio stamp verso. Editor’s pencil crop marks recto. VG+.

Evocative print by the acclaimed Mexican photojournalist. Despite the historical significance of his work documenting the Pachuco culture and Mexico City’s slums in the 1950s, holdings of vintage García prints are scarce in US institutions and often limited to portraits of his famous friends (Kahlo, Rivera, etc.).

SOLD

Two Photographs

[Lazo, Rina Wasern and Diego Rivera]. Two Photographs, ca. 1950. 13 x 17.5 cm. One captioned verso, the other with marks by the photographer or editor. Crop marks recto.

Photographs depict the Guatemala muralist Rina Lazo with her mentor, Diego Rivera. The two painters worked together on a number of commissions, she is best known for her murals at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.

$250

Musterbuch 3 Abteilung Hohlglas and Preisliste

(Trade Catalogue - Glass) Werkstätten Richard Süssmuth-Glaskunst. Musterbuch 3 Abteilung Hohlglas. Penzig in Schlesien [Pieńsk]: n.d. [1935]. Oblong 29 cm; [1], 18 b/w pls., reproducing photographs of glass tableware, the first pl. lightly soiled, the rest very good; in stab bound decorative portfolio, edgeworn with small closed tears. Together with: Werkstätten Richard Süssmuth-Glaskunst. Preisliste. Penzig in Schlesien: n.d. [1935]. Oblong 23 cm; [1], 20 pp. dampstain affecting first 2 leaves; stapled half-wrapper, heavily creased, starting near top staple.

Glass artist Richard Süssmuth (1900-1974) studied at Dresdner Akademie für Kunsthandwerk and set up his own workshop in Penzig in Schlesien in 1924. Influenced by Neue Sachlichkeit, Deutsche Werkbund, and Bauhaus, he designed simple, stylized glass tablewares. His workshop was destroyed during WWII and he left Silesia during the mass evacuation and expulsion of ethnic Germans from Polish territories after 1945. He settled in Immenhausen and started a new glassworks; today it is a glass museum.

Süssmuth’s work is included in the collections of The Met, MoMA, Victoria & Albert, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, etc., and yet no documentation of his workshop’s production prior to the war seems to be recorded in any OCLC institutions. The present example includes pull quotes from international arts reviews praising Süssmuth, including Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, La Revue-Moderne, and The Studio London. He won a Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale of 1954.

$500

Direcções Telefonicas

(Advertising - Socks - Spanish Civil War) Bosch & Baylina. Direcções Telefonicas. [Porto, Portugal]: [1938]. 30 cm. Unused. Decorative hanging telephone directory with color lithographic printing across fourteen heavy index cards mounted to board, the first further reinforced. Lightly abraded at center of design, affecting three leaves.

Lovely directory, each index page with a peppy promotional suggestion for Bosch & Baylina’s socks or expressing support for national industry and economy. The Portuguese factory was owned by Ramon Baylina, a supporter of the fascist Spanish Falange during the Civil War. As the president of Casa de España de Porto, he organized fundraisers for Spanish fascist causes and used his factories to host volunteer workshops to fabricate clothing for Spanish Falange soldiers. Curiously, Baylina also donated socks throughout the war to the Spanish Republican side.

“Calce a meia EGARA e não se arrependerá.”

No Bosch & Baylina materials recorded in OCLC.

$500

Selling Beauty

Helena Rubinstein. Selling Beauty. [New York]: 1941-1942. 3 issues: each 22 cm; 16, 20, and 16 pp.; b/w illustrations from orig. publicity artwork, reproductions of newspaper articles, and photographs; in red pictorial stapled wrappers, a few creases, VG.

Three otherwise unrecorded issues of Rubinstein’s internal sales magazine, introducing new products and pricing, updating ad campaigns, offering prizes for display case design, and distributing sales advice for Rubinstein sales girls. Helena Rubinstein’s marketing savvy is widely acknowledged, but we find no reference to these point-of-sale training manuals for selling during the war. “Make Beauty a Patriotic Duty!”

One full color reproduction of a Vogue ad laid in.

$145

The Secrets of Beauty

Helena Rubinstein. The Secrets of Beauty [cover title]. Paris; London; New York: Np, nd. (ca. 1927). Oblong 12.5 cm; 40 pp.; three b/w illustrations: one of Mme. Rubinstein and 2 of her NYC salons; in stapled cream and gold pictorial wrappers, rubbed, small area of loss to color on rear wrapper, top forecorner creased.

Rare descriptive trade catalogue for Helena Rubinstein’s Valaze line, with images of two of her NYC salons before they were remodeled and relocated in 1928. Numerous objects from her African, American, and Oceanic art collections are visible. A price index and table of contents at the end. The business address and product line lead us to suggest a date of 1927 with some confidence.

Rubinstein was a Jewish refugee who became one of the world’s richest women through her pioneering work in cosmetics and marketing.

Not recorded in OCLC.

SOLD

Typescript Letter (Jacob Lawrence)

(Lawrence, Jacob) Artist’s Committee for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Two-Page Typescript Letter. New York: 1963. Stapled, 8-½ x 11 in.; bottom corners torn away. Fair.

Jacob Lawrence was the Chairman of the artist’s fundraising committee for the iconic civil rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Here is a form letter from Lawrence to other artists on behalf of SNCC’s artist committee, describing a forthcoming exhibition and sale in support of the SNCC’s southern voter registration drive. “Artists, too, yearn for an end to racial injustice and the birth of equality for all men. Inspired by the students, we pledge ourselves to use our art to help guarantee support for this vital effort in which we deeply believe and upon which all our futures hinge.”

Scarce surviving documentation of Lawrence’s involvement with the committee in 1963, one other related letter held at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in the Philip Evergood papers.

$50

Three Modern Turkish Architecture Catalogues

(Architecture) (Turkey) Güngör, I Hulusi. Şehirler Nasıl Imar Edilir. Istanbul: Çeltüt Marbaacılık, 1969. Tall 4to, 160 pp.; primarily b/w illustrations, in pictorial wrappers, edge wear and a creased corner. VG. WITH: Gerçek, Cemil. Şevki Vanlı: Mimarlık Calışmaları. The works of Şevki Vanlı. Ankara: Yaprak Kitabevi, 1977. Square 4to, 142, [20] pp.; primarily b/w illustrations reproducing floorplans, elevations, sketches, and photographs, text in Turkish and English; in pictorial wrappers, binding tight, wrappers rubbed and toned, light bookstore stamp to front cover. AND: Gerçek, Cemil. Sedad Hakkı Eldem: Büyük Konutlar. Ankara: Yaprak Kitabevi, 1982. Square 4to, 160 pp.; primarily illustrations, reproducing elevations, floorplans, sketches, etc.; in pictorial french wrappers, worn and bumped, owner’s name in ink on half-title.

Three books on modern Turkish architecture. Two monographs celebrate the work of architects Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Şevki Vanlı, the third considers urban planning of outdoor space, mostly parks, playgrounds, public art, zoos, and street-level infrastructure including train stations, and garbage receptacles.

Two of the books were published by Yaprak Kitabevi for their nationalistic Proje Uygulama series (nos. 1 and 4 of 4), publicizing modern Turkish architecture.

We find no North American OCLC holdings of the first title, the second only at MIT.

$225

Cyklonette

(Trade Catalogue - Automobiles) Cyklon Maschinenfabrik LMD. Cyklonette [cover title]. Lista de Precios [half-title]. [Berlin]: 1910. Oblong 8vo (23.5 cm), 31 pp.; b/w illustrations throughout; color stapled pictorial wrappers, small closed puncture affecting entire text block and wrappers, two small tape repairs to verso of front wrap.

Rare Cyklonette tricycle catalogue, published for the Spanish market, including family and commercial models. Popular in Europe, the three-wheelers never caught on in the United States. Cyklon-Maschinenfabrik stuck with the design for almost twenty years, much longer than other carmakers, and they were used by the German and Polish Armies during WWI.

Only a single example of Cykon promotional materials is located in OCLC records, in Sweden.

$275

El Arte del Embellecimiento

(Trade Catalogue - Beauty) Tangee. El Arte del Embellecimiento [cover title]. [New York]: [George Luft], 1929. Oblong (10 cm), [16] pp.; profusely illustrated in color; stapled self-wrappers, very good.

American pharmacist George Luft built Tangee cosmetics and its “color-changing” lipstick formula into one of the most popular brands in the US before WWII. It excelled with colorful, modern branding and testimonials from many theater and film stars of the day (here Anita Page, Sue Carol, Ann Pennington, et al.). The present pamphlet designed for the Spanish market.

Scarce, no examples of Tangee trade materials are recorded in OCLC.

$250

Catálogo de Peletería

(Trade Catalogue - Fashion) Peletería Bertrán y Compania. Catálogo de Peletería. Barcelona: [Seix & Barral Herms.], [1915]. 4to (26.5 cm), [12] pp.; one page printed recto only, followed by [8] pp. of full-page plates with color graphics; in stapled french-fold wrapper with tipped-in pictorial illustration.

Fine example of exuberant graphics and luxury commercial activities at the beginning of WWI. Published by Barcelona graphics specialist, Seix & Barral.

Not found in OCLC.

$225

Catálogo de Peletería

(Trade Catalogue - Fashion) Peletería H. Solsona. Catálogo de Peletería. Barcelona: [Seix & Barral Herms.], [1917]. Tall 8vo (25 cm), [16] pp.; one page intro. followed by full-page illus. plates, each embellished with a unique b/w headpiece; in stapled color pictorial wrappers by “Porta”, fore-edge lightly foxed and chipped, not affecting illustration.

Eye-catching Orientalist pochoir(?) cover illustration followed by 15 furrier fashion plates, each with an amusing vignette (many with the specific animals used in the coat depicted in the plate, others of fashionable women out and about). Published by Barcelona graphics specialist, Seix & Barral.

Not found in OCLC.

$225

1ere Communion 1933

(Fashion) Printemps. 1ere Communion 1933. [Paris]: Herbert, 1933. Tall 8vo (23 cm), [16] pp.; mostly illustrations, in stapled pictorial wraps. WITH: Au Bon Marché. Première Communion. [Paris]: Desfossés, 1936. Oblong 8vo (19 cm), [24] pp.; illustrated in stapled color wraps, with laid in advertisement for printed communion souvenirs.

Two leading Parisian department stores advertise their photographic studios and large lines of communion clothes and accessories, mostly for girls.

$75

Publicité Chaumet. SEP/ETE/REM.

(Advertising) (Transportation) Chaumet, J. Publicité Chaumet. SEP/ETE/REM. [Paris]: [S.P.G.E. Hachard & Cie.], n.d. (1943?). 4to (28.3 cm), [12] pp., [2] pp. typed list of advertisements placed through Chaumet, and a TLS laid in, from Chaumet, dated Feb. 16, 1944; trade catalogue with b/w illus. throughout, near fine, in embossed stab-bound wrappers, front wrap with minor damp stain at top edge not affecting contents.

In his cover letter the Monsieur Chaumet lyrically describes exterior signs on autobuses as “moving poster[s] that circle through the major arteries of the cities.” The profusely illustrated catalogue details other opportunities for advertising on public transportation, station kiosks and walls, trolley stops, and other sites visible to commuters. Issued in 1944 when the French Resistance was targeting road signs to confuse German troop movements.

Not in OCLC.

$250

La Dattilografa: Canzone a ballo

(Women; Typists) (Operetta) Rocchi-Burlamacchi, G. La Dattilografa: Canzone a ballo. Florence: Mignani, 1939 [XVII].

Sheet music, 27 x 18.2 cm, [4] pp.; pictorial color self-wrapper. Cover sl. toned, very good.

A bit of social satire from fascist Italy in this suggestive song (for dancing!) about typists and their machines.

Not found in OCLC.

SOLD

Untitled Lithograph from Pel & Ploma

(Modernisme) Casas, Ramon. Untitled Lithograph from Pel & Ploma. Barcelona: Obrador Gràfic Thomas, n.d. [1903 or 1904]. Color lithograph. Sheet: 29.3 x 20 cm. Blind-stamped “Pel & Ploma” and “Thomas.” Two corners with very minor creases, not affecting image. Very good.

A plate, loose as issued, from the famed Catalan arts journal, Pel & Ploma (1899-1903), associated with Utrillo, Picasso, and Rodin. Ramon Casas was the primary illustrator and marketed the magazine through posters, special editions, and supplements such as this one. His frequent subject was the “new” woman—modern, bourgeois, educated, urban—engaged in intellectual activity and sport.

Pel & Ploma ceased publication in December 1903; Casas and Utrillo started Forma in Jan. 1904. This plate presumably celebrates the New Year.

$150

“Femme éternellement belle”...

(Pochoir) (Perfume) (Orientalism) Mary Blanc.“Femme éternellement belle”... [Paris: Les Papeterie Glandières, ca. 192-.] 16 x 11 cm., [8] pp.; descriptive text and price list of beauty products influenced by “Hindu” recipes and secrets passed from Marco Polo to the Italian Renaissance and to France; wrappers with color pochoir print on front cover, slight discoloration on blank edge of cover otherwise very good.

Attractive pochoir design reminiscent of Léon Bakst’s orientalist costume designs for the Ballet Russes. The small printing house, Les Papeterie Glandières, had a specialty in pochoir printing.

Not located in OCLC.

$95

Skema. Mensile fotografico d’attualità. (All published).

Skema. Mensile fotografico d’attualità. Anno I, No. 1 (November 1969) through Anno VI, No. 12 (December 1974) (all published). Bologna: [ALFA Farmaceutici], 1969-1974.

Comprising a complete run of a rare Italian photographic serial with poster-sized color inserts designed and distributed in association with ALFA Farmaceutici. Monographic issues cover social, cultural, or political themes relevant to this tumultuous period in world history; each introduced by famous Italian public intellectuals, journalists, politicians, scientists, artists, and writers. Including Umberto Eco, Federico Fellini, Gianni Agnelli, and Gillo Dorfles.

Skema was a forum for unmediated photographic storytelling loosely modeled on the anti-realist movement Gruppo 63. In the first issue the editors state “ideas will be directly and freely provided by images: a medium that suffers from fewer alterations.” Echoing some of the experimentalist manifestos of Il Verri, Skema’s editors criticized the perceived transparency of language, freeing meaning to be made instead in the mind of the “viewer.” “Words will remain at the bottom,” with captions and textual interpretation only where world events “most deeply dug a furrow, or a wound, on the crust of common beliefs.”

The eye-catching covers, unusual photographic spreads, and striking color inserts were the responsibility of designer Marco Caroli. Together with editor Franco Vanni, they created a unique visual language juxtaposing international photojournalism, modern infographics, and quotable short form essays in a section called “di parere.”

Topical issues included protest movements, drugs, feminism, avantgarde theater, and Vietnam. But many were also dedicated to scientific and economic aspects of the difficult period that followed Italy’s “economic miracle”: hunger, prisons, agriculture, space, housing, the elderly, divorce, computers, mafia, circus, ecology, China, Latin America, propaganda, anthropology, and a few on single artists or philosophers: Irinia Ionesco, Ghitta Carell, Pablo Picasso, Diderot, and Galileo; among the photojournalism are press photos of installation art, Pop, and assemblage by artists including Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, and Ed Kienholz.

The scarcity of complete runs and bibliographic study has led to confusion about Skema’s origins. It is not, as it is often described, a progressive publication with independent social criticism. Instead, it is a deft work of appropriation: produced by Alfa as a promotional tool for its medical and biotech clientele. Skema’s inventive design and forward-looking reporting were a creative and subtle advertisement that was discontinued when production became too expensive. We speculate that Skema was the brainchild of Alfa’s founder, Marino Golinelli, listed in early issues as a member of the editorial board. Later Golinelli became an important collector of contemporary art and a celebrated philanthropist supporting projects in education, arts, and the sciences.

These experimental artistic attitudes were brought to bear on the cataclysmic socio-economic changes affecting lived realities in Italy and abroad. In the case of Skema, they reflect an increased demand for cultural consumption from a new Italian middle class, and the growing sophistication of bourgeois taste.

Scarce. OCLC finds one complete run at the University of Rome. A few scattered issues recorded in British, European, and North American holdings (UCSD and UCLA).

$4500

62 numbers in 58 fascicules, plus two supplements (to Anno III, no. 2 and Anno V, no. 10), Issues range from 60-74 pp., early issues almost exclusively illustrated, reproducing b/w photographs from Italian and international press agencies, including ANSA, Farabola, Publifoto, Keystone, Liverani, Lehtikuva, UPI, and AP among many. Later issues with up to 20 pp. of text on orange newsprint. About 30 issues with color inserts or advertisements offered as a “manifesto” or “regalo una stampa a colori,” some in poster format (unfolded: 22 ½ x 15 ¾ in.), others small bound-in half-page pamphlets, or full-page vintage Fiat ads. Some toning as expected, illustrated wrappers somewhat rubbed, scattered creasing and rounding at corners. Many stamped internally “Omaggi ALFA Farmaceutici [...]” Small loss to front wrap of Anno. I, No. 1. Lacking five inserts or advertisements as follows: Anno II, Nos. 4 and 13; Anno III, No. 7; Anno IV, No. 3; and Anno V, no. 12.

Twenty-One Egyptian and Syrian Tourist Guides, Pamphlets, and Ephemera

​(Middle East) (Tourism) Sammelband of Twenty-One Egyptian and Syrian Tourist Guides, Pamphlets, and Ephemera, ca. 1958. 24.5 cm. Materials primarily printed in Cairo and Damascus, a few from Madrid, Brussels, et al. Most illustrated in color, with texts in Arabic, English, French, German, and Spanish. Various sizes with orig. wrappers bound in red cloth with gilt title to spine, boards rubbed and bumped, endpapers brittle and worn. Two guides with losses or closed tears, rest good.

In addition to guides to the obvious touristic destinations, many items promoting modern life and industry in the Middle East, including a copy of Abdel Nasser’s Philosophy of the Revolution, and a 40 pp. promotional booklet for the Sadd-El-Aali dam.

$300

Group of Black LGBTQ+ Club Ephemera, San Francisco

Group of Black LGBTQ+ Club Ephemera, San Francisco, ca. 1970-1973. Seven broadsides and handbills: four 215 x 280 mm, two half-sheet handbills approx. 215 x 115 mm, one smaller, approx. 77 x 109 mm.; four black and white, three on colored papers, one broadside pierced at corners from orig. staples, else VG+.

Scarce documentation of social spaces for transgender people of color in the 1970s. Bo Jangles, a.k.a. Bojangles, was a black-owned club at Larkin and Ellis in “Polk Gulch,” the center of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ bar scene in the 1960s and 1970s. It is described by trans activist Red Jordan Arobateau in his semi-autobiographical novel “Autumn Changes,” as an “all black [Soul] club full of sissies, dikes, studs and a few straight customers. Transsexual queens black as Cleopatra reign in full face, form & fashion. And small drag butches congregate; a few are ex prison inmates; and two of the most successful black lesbian pimps come down with their string of ladies for a night out on the town.” Weekly “taped” soul nights are advertised here along with live latin fusion music from bands Christian Black and Black Magic.

In the mid-1970s Bojangles relocated to the Tenderloin(?), where it continued to cater to a “black and brown queer crowd.”

$550

Nineteen Press Photographs of Havana Riots, President Céspedes, and La Pentarquía

(Cuba) Nineteen Press Photographs of Havana Riots, President Céspedes, and La Pentarquía, 1933. Vintage silver prints, trimmed to various sizes, most close to 16.5 x 11.5 cm. Sixteen with typed English captions pasted verso, all with Vidal (Madrid) stamps, some with editing pencil marks, also verso. Lightly worn, three groups of prints (4, 2, and 2) taped together by a contemporary newspaper editor for layout. Overall VG.

Dramatic photographs taken during the first “Cuban crisis” of August-September 1933, including the Havana strikes and riots that led to the resignation and exile of President Gerardo Machado, the formation of a provisional government under President Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and the subsequent coup d’etat that led to the latter’s removal and the establishment of the Pentarchy coalition.

The majority are focused on looting and violence in front of the Presidential Palace and the offices of El Heraldo newspaper in August 1933. Two captions identify members of the ABC resistance and other student organizations that fought against Machado and “El Porra,” the regime’s secret police.

Several other images show the Céspedes cabinet and moments from during the Sergeant’s Revolt in which it was overthrown. The constitutional crisis began decades of political instability and US interference, leading directly to the Batista dictatorship and eventually, to the Cuban Revolution.

No photographer identified but the captions were supplied by a US news organization. Stamps identify a Spanish agency founded by José Vidal.

$950

75 Photographs of the Aftermath of the Mexico City Earthquake

75 Photographs of the Aftermath of the Mexico City Earthquake, 1985. Black and white gelatin prints, each 8.5 cm x 12 cm, a few over or under exposed, one duplicate. Uniform mild curling, VG. Sleeved.

Amateur photography of Mexico’s era-defining event, the 8.0 earthquake which struck the city in the early morning of September 19, 1985. Three to four minutes of shaking leveled much of the historic center, causing a still unknown number of deaths in addition to devastating losses to infrastructure and housing. The response of the PRI government was to create a media blackout; their denial of the seriousness of the damage led to riots, looting, and delays in search and rescue as well as emergency aid. Some historians believe the corruption exposed by the PRI’s mismanagement contributed to the end of their single-party rule fifteen years later.

Despite the fact that the international press had access to early photos of the destruction, many Mexicans did not see the extent of the damage for weeks or months. The unknown photographer of the current group appears to have taken some of the photos of police and armed guards surreptitiously, focusing their lens downward in the street to capture the activities of cleaning crews, people carrying water, and broken sidewalks. From buildings that may be identified, the photographer covered quite a bit of distance, including outer zones of the city and slums whose damage is not otherwise well documented.

Although most of the images are informally composed, some include the photographer’s shadow or demonstrate a more self-conscious presentation of the dramatic ruins.

SOLD

Six Photographs of Prostitution, Mexico City

Hermanos Mayo, Los. Six Photographs of Prostitution, Mexico City, 195[0]. Gelatin prints, each 17 x 13 cm with studio stamp verso and editorial marks, including one typed caption “Prostitucion”. Date stamped 18 Enero 195[0], possibly 195[3]. Two with red editorial pencil marks recto, some minor wear to surfaces, overall VG.

The Hermanos Mayo photographic collective adopted their nom de guerre in reference to May Day labor protests in Madrid in the early 1930s. Comprising five brothers from two families, the group’s pseudonym “Mayo” affirmed their individual commitments to the struggle of the working class and the Spanish Second Republic. The early influence of Republican anarcho-syndicalism set the tone for the extraordinary body of work they produced in Spain, as war photographers, and in exile in Mexico, where Foto Hermanos Mayo was a successful agency for fifty years.

Together, they pioneered the use of Leica street photography in Mexican photojournalism, producing more than 5 million negatives working for periodicals including El popular, La prensa, Hoy, Mañana, Siempre!, Tiempo, Time and Life. They were unflinching chroniclers of labor and and the lower classes, as evidenced in this unusual series of female sex workers on the streets of Mexico City. The women are seen in day and night, interacting with police (as clients?) and other passersby. In a few images they seem to be aware of the photographer, hiding their faces; in others they smile broadly outside the hotels where they work.

The work bears some resemblance to the photographs of sex workers taken by Weegee in New York City during the same time period. They reflect the commitment of the Mayos to using the press photo format to advance a social message. Compared, for example, to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico City (1934), which shows two sex workers from close range looking out of windows, the images place the women in their environment, shown as part of the landscape with their clientele. Current scholarship has suggested that between 15-30% of young Mexican women were employed as sex workers in the beginning of the century, with many impoverished women working as sex workers in the post-Revolution decades that followed.*

Rare. Vintage prints from Hermanos Mayo’s influential career documenting Mexico City’s dramatic postwar expansion and social crises are largely absent from US institutional and museum holdings. Most contemporary prints would have been produced solely for distribution to the press and remain scarce. The Hermanos Mayo archive was purchased by the state and is now housed at the Mexico National Archives in CDMX.

*Bliss, Katherine Elaine (24 February 2004). “A Right to Live as Gente Decente: Sex Work, Family Life, and Collective Identity in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico”. Journal of Women’s History. 15 (4): 164–169.

$1800

Offered in collaboration with Auger Down Books.

Agro: La Mejor Revista del Campo. Año I, No. 5.

Agro: La Mejor Revista del Campo. Año I, No. 5. (June 1955). Mexico, D.F.: Imp. Cal-Yu-Mex. 4to, 30 pp., pictorial illus. wrapper, chipped with small closed tears. Toned.

One issue of a government sponsored(?) agricultural serial distributed for free to “campesinos, agricultores, miembros de las Sociedades de Crédito Ejidal.” Sections on farming, labor organizing, health, and religion.

OCLC listed only at BNM (partial).

$50

Mitos y Leyendas de Teotihuacan [...]

[Dominguez, Francisco; Gonzalez, Carlos; and Efren Orozco Rosales] Departamento del Distrito Federal [México], Dirección General de Acción Cívica. Mitos y Leyendas de Teotihuacan. Creación del Quinto Sol; Sacrificio Gladiatorio: Escenificaciones Musicadas // Myths and Legends of Teotihuacan. Creation of the Fifth Sun; Gladiatory Sacrifices: Musically Arranged Scenes. Mexico, D.F.:, Imp. “Cosmos”, 1935. Tabloid, 29 pp.; program with illus. head- and tail-pieces, mostly repeating from Spanish to English sections, and map; stapled stiff card wrapper, with color illus. recto and verso. Damage to wrapper at lower forecorner, causing small area of loss through the text block (not affecting text or images). Rear wrapper chipped with earlier tape repair. Only fair.

Souvenir program for a musical event held at the Teotihuacan archeological zone for the international Lion’s Club convention in 1935 (the first time the annual convention was held in a non-English speaking country). Includes a map of the zone indicating where the performance took place and how visits were directed. More than 6,000 members attended the convention, where they were greeted by President Cárdenas.

$50

Primer Salon Nacional de la Estampa

[Guati Rojo, Alfredo]. Primer Salon Nacional de la Estampa. Exh. cat. [Mexico, D.F]: [Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes], 1972. Square 8vo, [36] pp.; profusely illus. checklist with reproductions of artists’ works. Stapled wrapper toned but tight, pinholes affecting second half of text block and rear wrapper.

A new salon for contemporary Mexican printmaking, bypassing the established “Salones Anuales de Grabado.” Including many important Mexican modernists and a wide array of styles.

Unrecorded in OCLC.

$50

Boletín de Artes Visuales. Nos. 1 and 4.

Unión Panamericana, Sección de Artes Visuales. Boletín de Artes Visuales. Nos. 1 and 4. [Washington, D.C.]: [Unión Panamericana], [1956/1957; 1958/1959]. Two vols.: 80, 61 pp.; illus. throughout; in pictorial color wraps, lightly worn.

Uncommon early issues of a comprehensive Latin American visual art digest reporting on exhibitions, conferences, publications and other activities in the Americas and beyond.

$100

Five Programs from the Inaugural Season of Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires: Amlet, Aurora; et al.

(Opera) (Art Nouveau) Five Programs from the Inaugural Season of Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires: Amlet; Aurora; Don Giovanni; Otello; and Pagliacci / Tristano e Isotta. [Buenos Aires, Argentina]: [Imprenta Tragant], [1908]. Trimmed sizes vary slightly, each approx. 26.5 x 14.3 cm, 23 pp.; illus. throughout from b/w photos of conductors, singers, and composers, and advertisements, some toning throughout, a few small closed tears or chipping, Otello with more substantial wear and losses; stapled color pictorial wrappers illus. by “Benesch,” four with small ink inscriptions on cover identifying the opera. Aurora staples removed.

The original Teatro Colón was closed in 1888 to make way for a modern national opera. The new building took twenty years to complete, and it opened in May, 1908, with a performance of Aida. The highlight of the inaugural season was the world premiere of Hector Panizza’s Aurora, the first “Argentinian” opera, commissioned by the theater. Beloved by Buenos Aires’s audiences, the tenor aria “Alta en el cielo” became the hymn for the Argentine national flag. The present group includes the program for this premiere, conducted by Panizza. It also includes a program for Pagliacci; the featured soprano, Emilia Reussi, was the first Argentine woman to sing at the Colón.

The programs are each printed in 2-4 colors. They include plot synopsis and Art Nouveau advertisements for liquors, interior furnishings, fashions, soaps, perfumes, opera glasses, pianos, Pathé records and phonographs, and modern appliances, including an early domestic vacuum.

Not recorded in OCLC.

$1500

Venus: Las Estrellas en Exclusiva! Nos. 73, 75-77, 79-82, 84-85, 88, 91-92, 95-104.

(Cinema) (Mexploitation) (Prensa Rojo) Samayoa Lizárraga, Carlos, Ed. Venus: Las Estrellas en Exclusiva! Nos. 73, 75-77, 79-82, 84-85, 88, 91-92, 95-104. México: D.F.: [Publicaciones Llergo], 1966. Small folio, 23 issues, each 31 pp., bound with orig. illustrated wrappers in contemporary cloth with orig. covers. Newsprint fragile and lightly toned, some minor chipping, creases.

A broken but substantial run of an otherwise unrecorded chiefly photographic tabloid featuring the major and minor actresses of Mexican cinema. Each issue with full-page centerfolds. The editor, Carlos Samayoa founded the iconic tabloid weekly Alarma! in 1963. As the original prensa rojo, Alarma! revolutionized the Mexican popular press and Samayoa (together with right wing publisher Regino Hernandez Llegro) led the era-defining transition to sensationalist journalism.

Venus follows Samayoa’s successful graphic formula at Alarma!, with a skillful combination of photography, eye-catching headlines, and gossipy industry columns. Issues are dedicated to well-regarded actresses and singers of the 1960s including Lilia Prado, Maria Victoria, Angélica María, Ana Bertha Lepe, Sonia Infante, Ana Martín Yolanda Montes (Tongolele), and Gina Romand. Retrospectively Venus documents a generation of women whose work on Mexploitation films has largely been forgotten. These include Mary Esquivel, Rossy Mendoza, Mayte Carol, Angelita Castany, Grace Polit, Marga Lopez, Ana María Fernández Pomar, Elsa Cárdenas, Eva Norvind, Jeanine Acosta, Fanny Cano, Maria Fuensanta, Malu Reyes, Vianey Lárraga, Olga Guillot, et al.

Articles written under pseudonyms report on social issues of the 1960s, including “skirts vs. pants,” and actresses exploited in border towns of Cd. Juarez and Tijuana by Northamerican tourists. Privilege given to actresses of Mexican origin, frequent accusations of malinchismo to those descriminating against Mexican beauties.

$900

Two programs celebrating the inauguration of Mexico’s Supreme Court buildings in 1904 and 1964

(Architecture) (Law) Santacruz y Olivier. Inauguración del Ala Poniente del Palacio de Justicia Civil [cover title]. [Mexico, D.F.]: Tip. de la Oficina Impresora del Timbre, 1904. Small folio, 36 pp.; 18 full page b/w reproductions of photographs and elevations with captions, texts facing, first leaf chipped with small losses, closed tear to fore-edge affecting all leaves, repaired with tape recto. Decorative wrapper, orig. stab bound, stained and rubbed, in recent protective mylar sleeve. Together with: Carvajal Herrera, Fernando, Ed. Palacio de Justicia del Distrito Federal Ad Perpetuam Rei Memoriam. Mexico, D.F.: Imprenta Ayuntamiento, 1964. 4to, 131 pp.; first 60 pp. a history of the courts and their organization, Mexican legal code, and the orig. courthouses on calle Donceles, the remainder a profusely illus. account of the new building by Juan Sordo Madaleno and Assoc., its construction and inauguration, some in color. Cloth, gilt title on front board. Edition of 1000.

The first a large, privately printed program celebrating the inauguration of the new national and federal district courthouses on calle Cordobanes (now Donceles). Produced by the engineers who directed the renovation of the buildings, the large plates are accompanied by text detailing the contracts, costs, and results of the work. The government requested the renovation to bring a “more adequate character to the important” offices whose “gloomy appearances” made a “poor impression on foreigners.” Approved in 1900, the work was not completed until 1904 due to engineering challenges discussed here at length. The physical separation of the federal and district courts was accompanied by their legal separation.

The buildings on Donceles remained the primary courts in Mexico City until the subject of the second volume, the new Palacio de Justicia del Distrito Federal, was completed in 1964. This edition was produced to commemorate Juan Sordo Madaleno’s modernist design, whose streamlined spatial organization was intended to reflect a similar rationalization of Mexico’s federal legal code. Exemplar of Latin American modernism as both a corporatist and nationalist aesthetic.

Both quite scarce, OCLC finding only one holding apiece, the former at UT-Austin, the latter at LA Law Library.

$550

Museos: Realizaciones y Proyectos

[Rivera, Ruth Marín]. Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Museos: Realizaciones y Proyectos. UNESCO/INBA [cover title]. Catalogue for an exhibition held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Departamento de Arquitectura, September-October, 1962. [Mexico, D.F.]: [Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes], [1962]. Oblong 4to, [88] pp.; mostly illustrations; illus. wrappers very worn, spine starting, crease affecting upper corner continues throughout text block.

Terrific catalogue of realized and unrealized museums in Mexico, curated by the director of the Department of Architecture at INBA, Ruth Rivera (Diego Rivera’s daughter). It introduces lesser known projects that were part of a huge surge in national modernist architecture during the 1950 and 1960s. These include three planned border museums in Matamoros; Tijuana; and Ciudad Juarez, all designed by Pedro Ramirez Vazquez under the auspices of the Programa Nacional Fronterizo.

Ruth Rivera’s key role as a promoter and archivist of Mexican modernist architecture is often overlooked. Her design for the Galerias Salon de la Plastica Mexicana is included here.

OCLC finds three holdings in North American institutions: Univ. of Arizona, UC Santa Barbara, and the CCA, Montreal.

$250

Acción Plástica Popular: Educación y Aprendizaje a Escala Nacional. Con ciento cinco reproducciones

(Arts Education) (Socialism) García Maroto, Gabriel. Acción Plástica Popular: Educación y Aprendizaje a Escala Nacional. Con ciento cinco reproducciones. México, D.F.: Editorial Plastica Americana, 1945. 8vo, 220 pp.; profuse b/w illus. from woodcuts by Mexican students and the author, plus [32] b/w pls. reproducing artworks from Mexico and Spain, as well as infographics and other designs by the author. In yellow pictorial publisher’s cloth, worn and darkened, corner’s bumped, spine with small losses to cloth at foot. Ink marks on ffep and rear pastedown.

Well-illustrated book about a short-lived experimental children’s art program, the Escuelas de Acción Artística (EAA). Iterations in both Mexico and Cuba built on the revolutionary educational ideals of the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, founded a decade earlier in Mexico City. The EAA incorporated these ideals with indigenous methods and styles, and prioritized free expression. These were important aspects of Indigenismo in Mexican arts in the early twentieth century, but the schools were later criticized for paternalistic assumptions about the “authenticity” of “naive” native arts.

The author, Gabriel García Maroto, was an exiled Spanish printer, artist, and critic who trained in one of Cuba’s Escuelas de Acción Artística in the late 1920s. He brought the EAA philosophy to Michoacan, founding several programs there with the support of governor (and future President) Lazaro Cárdenas. The schools taught print-making, drawing, and painting to predominantly indigenous and working-class women and children. Aligned with Cárdenas’s work on agrarian and land reform, García Maroto believed that his schools could teach the people to “possess” their land through art.

García Maroto was a member of avant-garde Spanish artistic circles in the 1920s and 30s. As a printer, he was an active member of the Republican Asociación de Intelectuales Antifascistas para la Defensa de la Cultura and had the distinction of publishing Frederico García Lorca’s first book. He began “Editorial Plastica Americana’’ with the intention of issuing a “Colección Plástica Mexicana” series but this appears to be the only title ever published under either imprint. After settling in Mexico, he also promoted art education for children with hearing problems. The book is dedicated to his son, the deaf painter Jose García Narezo.

See: Jolly, Jennifer. Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2018, pp. 47-51.

$550

Arquitectura de la Ciudad de México: Guía

International Union of Architects. World Congress; Trueblood, Beatrice. Arquitectura de la Ciudad de México: Guía / Architectura [sic] du Mexico: Guide / Mexico City Arquitecture [sic]: Guide. México, D.F.: [International Union of Architects], [1978]. Tall 8vo, 199 pp.; b/w illus. of 74 sites, with 11 folding maps locating each building, pp. 167-173 misbound. In pictorial wraps, with 1 in. loss at spine, adhesive failing, one signature semi-detached. Fair only. Previous owner inscription on half-title.

Fascinating and thorough guide to the historical and modern architecture of Mexico City, prepared for the IUA’s 1978 World Congress. Many unexpected buildings featured among the more obvious highlights. All text given in Spanish, French, and English. Design by Beatrice Trueblood, co-designer of the ‘68 Olympiad graphics.

Scarce, OCLC finds four copies in the Americas: Harvard, Dumbarton Oaks, Library of Congress, Pratt.

$175

Plastica Bajacaliforniana: Selección Bienal 1977

Plastica Bajacaliforniana: Selección Bienal 1977. Exh. cat. [México, D.F.]: [Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes], [1977]. Square 8vo, [24] pp.; intro by critic Raquel Tibol, reproductions of artists’ works followed by bios and checklist. Stapled wrapper tight, a few small dents.

Catalogue of the second Baja artist biennial, held at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. One OCLC holding: LACMA.

$45

Centro Deportivo Chapultepec: Recuerdo de la Inauguración de los Nuevos Edificios

(Architecture) (Muralism) [Almanza, Gaspar Octavio]. [Romo, Ramiro]. Centro Deportivo Chapultepec: Recuerdo de la Inauguración de los Nuevos Edificios [cover title]. México, D.F.: [Junta Directiva del Centro Deportivo Chapultepec], 1950. 8vo, [32] pp.; chiefly illus. b/w reproductions of photos of the ceremony, building, and murals. Stapled pictorial wraps printed in blue recto and verso, edges chipped front and rear.

Souvenir program celebrating the inauguration of a new sports complex in Chapultepec Park, a collaboration between the Bank of Mexico and the government of President Alemán. Designed by architects Gonzalo Garita and Carlos Romo. The majority of the booklet is given over to a text by Almanza interpreting the building’s commissioned murals by Ramiro Romo Estada, a student of José Clemente Orozco. Concludes with excerpts of press coverage praising the government, etc.

A single holding located in OCLC: UC-Berkeley.

$150

10 Mujeres y Textil en 3D / 10 Women and Textile into 3D

Galleria Universitaria Aristos. 10 Mujeres y Textil en 3D / 10 Women and Textile into 3D. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1975. Square 8vo, [16] pp.; intro, checklist and 11 b/w pls.; stapled pictorial wraps, sunned. Printed by Imprenta Madero.

Exh. cat. in Spanish and English, exploring contemporary fiber arts in Mexico, including Marta Palau, Leticia Arroyo, et al., and paying “homage to the creative weaver during the Women’s International Year.” Introduced by anthropologist and curator Marta Turok.

$60

Inauguración de su Nuevo Edificio

Secretaria de Recursos Hidráulicos. Inauguración de su Nuevo Edificio. México, D.F.: N.p., n.d. [1950]. Oblong 11-½ x 7-¾ in., [16] pp.; illus. throughout, with a white inauguration ribbon stapled to the first leaf. Pictorial wraps with orig. clear plastic DJ. Front wrap creased. Good.

Souvenir of the inauguration of the politically important ministry’s new building, commissioned in 1946 by President Alemán. Reviews history of water works in Mexico, including dams and irrigation. Several leaves with highlights of the new building, designed by architects Del Moral y Pani with later assistance by Gustavo Saavedra.

Not found in OCLC.

SOLD

La Lotta Contro La Prostitutzione

Pannain, Remo. La Lotta Contro La Prostitutzione. Benevenuto: Borelli, n.d., ca. 1929. 8vo, 28 pp.; a few pencil marks in margin; in printed stapled wrapper.

Unusual legal treatise published in Southern Italy about the struggle there against prostitution.

No North American holdings recorded in OCLC.

$95

Ultra: Wrestling Gals, Bizarre Fads, Exotic Fashions. Vol. 1, No. 3.

[Zucker, Hal]. Zucca, H. Ultra: Wrestling Gals, Bizarre Fads, Exotic Fashions. Vol. 1, No. 3. New York, NY: Ultra Sports Co., 1958. 8-¼ x 5-½ in., 61, [3] pp.; b/w illus. from artwork by Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton among many others, uncredited; in orig. color stapled wrappers, with remnants of red privacy tape at edges and a handwritten price in upper corner, small loss to bottom of rear wrap.

One of four total numbers of this domination and sports fetish digest. Single OCLC holding at Yale, of the first issue.

$95

(Sexual Health) Aux Victimes de L’Amour

(Sexual Health) Bertray, A. Aux Victimes de L’Amour by Doctor Bertray Professor ... of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris . Paris: [Dupont], nd [ca. 1900]. 4-3/4 x 3-1/8 in., 8 pp.; stapled self-wraps, 1 mm closed tear front wrap fore-edge, else very good. Dr. Bertray will “relieve and heal what he bonhomie called the little miseries of Parisians.” A related edition held at BNF only, otherwise unrecorded.

$ 45

(Sexual Health) (Soldiers) Keeping Fit to Fight; Sex Hygiene and Venereal Disease

(Sexual Health) (Soldiers) (WWI) (WWII) War Department and American Social Hygiene Association. Keeping Fit to Fight. [New York?], n.d. [1918?]. 16 pp.; with medical illus.; ex-library, withdrawn stamp on front wrap. Together with: War Department. Sex Hygiene and Venereal Disease. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942. Small oblong pamphlet, 8 pp.; tape at spine, front wrap heavily marked in contemporary pen. “A copy will be furnished to each recruit upon enlistment.”

Two pamphlets written for newly enlisted soldiers in both World Wars, describing sex and venereal disease in American vernacular. Sections on wet dreams, masturbation, and including contemporary slang, e.g. “Lues” for syphilis.

$50

(Sexual Health) (Government) Six Booklets, Reports, and Pamphlets

(Sexual Health) (Government) United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, Washington, D.C. Six Booklets, Reports, and Pamphlets. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920. All 8vo, varying from 11-272 pp.; one with folding maps and organizational chart; all in paper wraps with stab holes from previous binding, one front wrap separated, else good.

Scarce documentation of the federal effort to coordinate research and prevention against social disease, within the armed forces and through federal funding to the States. Together a rich document of federal operations and organization in relation to private and state-funded efforts. Including “a study of the records of six thousand delinquent women …” Titles all from 1920, including:

Scientific Researches (January 1920); Program of Protective Social Measures Showing a Type of Federal aid available to States in connection with Venereal Disease Control (February 1920); Scientific Researches: Second Announcement. Section I, Section II (April 1920); Manual for the Various Agents of the United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board with appendices containing the federal law creating the Board, amendments thereto, regulations regarding funds administered by this Board, financial statements, a study of the records of six thousand delinquent women [...]; and Report of the United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1920.

Our research indicates most with only scattered US institutional physical holdings, despite labyrinthine OCLC records indicating otherwise.

$250

(Sexual Health) (Education) Seven Booklets and Pamphlets

(Sexual Health) (Education) (New York) New York Social Hygiene Society; American Social Hygiene Association. Seven Booklets and Pamphlets, 1914-1924. 8vo, each 4-171 pp., most approx. 12 pp.; two with b/w illus. throughout, in various printed wrappers, most ex-library with accession stamps and pencil shelf labels. Overall Good.

Based in New York, the founders of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) included reformers and philanthropists such as Jane Addams and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. At least through the early 1920s ASHA shared an address with the New York Social Hygiene Society, formerly the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, the earliest of the American “voluntary social hygiene associations,” and a member of ASHA. The New York Society and ASHA cooperated with medical organizations, law enforcement, and social welfare groups to develop public information campaigns: mainly in the form of lectures, pamphlets, and journals.

This group includes two well-illustrated examples: Frank J. Osborne. A Health Exhibit for Men. New York, NY: New York Social Hygiene Society, 1917, with a few closed tears; and The New York Social Hygiene Society, Inc., 1916-1917 [title from cover]. New York, NY. Both booklets document public exhibits and lectures given in the state of New York.

Also: American Social Hygiene Association. First Annual Report, 1913-1914. New York, NY: The American Society Hygiene Association, 1914. Frank J. Osborne. The Control of Venereal Disease from the Public Health Standpoint. New York, NY: The New York Social Hygiene Society, 1917. Will Irwin. Conquering an Old Enemy. New York, NY: The American Society Hygiene Association, 1920. Publications of the American Social Hygiene Association, 1918. Bigelow, Maurice. The Established Points in Social Hygiene Education. New York, NY: American Social Hygiene Association, 1924.

$200

(Sexual Health) (Education) Circular Nos. 2-4

(Sexual Health) (Education) (Illinois) Chicago Society of Social Hygiene. Circular No. 2. Self-Protection: Sexual Hygiene For Young Men; Circular No. 3. Family Protection: For the Protection of Wives and Children from Venereal Contamination; Circular No. 4. Community Protection: Education against Venereal Disease a Need of the State. Chicago, IL: Chicago Society of Social Hygiene, n.d. [ca. 1911-1920]. 8vo, each pamphlet [4] pp.; no. 2 somewhat toned, else good.

Public health pamphlets issued by the Chicago member organization of the American Social Hygiene Association. Scarce in the market and institutionally, OCLC seemingly records less than 5 physical copies of each circular, possibly fewer?

$100

(Sexual Health) (Education) (Illinois) Manpower

(Sexual Health) (Education) (Illinois) Public Health Service, United States. Manpower. Venereal Disease Pamphlet No. 6. [Springfield IL?]: Social Hygiene Press; State Department of Public Health, Illinois, n.d. [ca. 1919]. 16 pp. pamphlet, stapled pictorial color wrapper, 1mm closed tear, recto, else very good.

“Sex—uncontrolled is disaster and wreck. Sex in control for men means Power.” Original emphasis.

A few pamphlets from this series held at Harvard and Oberlin, this one seemingly unrecorded in OCLC.

$45

(Sexual Health) (Education) (California) A Plain Explanation of the Greatest Social Evil

(Sexual Health) (Education) (California) Howard, Wm. Lee. A Plain Explanation of the Greatest Social Evil. San Francisco, CA: Purity Educational League of North America, 1910; and California Social Hygiene Society. 16 pp.; stapled printed wraps, ex-library with stamps and shelf-marks. Circular No. 8: The Need for Education in Sex Hygiene. San Francisco, CA: n.d. [ca. 1913]. 9 pp.; stapled self-wrapper, very good.

Early sex hygiene pamphlets. Although its name suggests otherwise, the Purity Educational League of North America was committed to a “wholesome discussion of sex life” featuring “pure and healthful knowledge,” in contrast to the “silence and secrecy” of past policy. “By secrecy we encourage mental perversion.” Sex education is patriotic.

$30

(Sex Work) Group of Sex Work Ephemera from Brazil, England, and the US

(Sex Work) Group of Sex Work Ephemera from Brazil, England, and the US, 1975-2001.

Comprised of: Hustlers’ Rights Project, We Are the Target [San Francisco, CA: 1975], (10) stapled fliers from the Bay Area Gay Liberation organizing against antiprositution activities, verso printed with mailing list? of California organizations; Coyote and Project AWARE, Sex in the Age of Aids: A forum for women who work in the sex industry, [San Francisco, CA: 1985], small pink flier, printed recto and verso, corner with loss, advertising AIDS antibody testing and a public panel conversation; King’s Cross Women’s Centre, Centrepiece 5: The Hooker & The Beak, London, 1987; W.H.I.S.P.E.R.: Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt, Vol. I, No. 3 (Winter 1986-87) and Vol. II, No. 1 (Spring 1987), New York: NY. Together with Maria José Bacelar Guimarães, “Empresário procura mulher jovem, morena, bonita, liberal…”: Explorando os anúncios de estrangeiros, Salvador, Brasil: Centro Humanitário de Apoio à Mulher, 2002, 106 pp. with bibliography.

$150

(Sex Education) (Antisemitism) Collection of Anti-Sex Education and Moral Decency Literature

(Sex Education) (Christian) (Antisemitism) Collection of Anti-Sex Education and Moral Decency Literature, 1956-1970.

Comprising 11 booklets and pamphlets from both Christian and conservative morality campaigns, including Christian Crusade, The John Birch Society, The Movement to Restore Decency (MOTOREDE), and the National Organization for Decent Literature. Most examples are argued from Christian perspectives, some with explicit racist, sexist, anticommunist, and antisemitic content corresponding to far-right panic over the cultural impact of school integration and sexuality education. Frequent references to counterculture and the “sexual indoctrination” espoused by the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS; founded by Dr. Mary Calderone, medical director for Planned Parenthood Federation of America). Some illustrated. Scattered holdings in OCLC, some unrecorded. Overall condition very good.

$400

In chronological order: Publications Disapproved for Youth by the National Organization for Decent Literature: June 1956. Chicago, IL: NODL, 1956. [12] pp. pamphlet with book list by genre; 20th Century Reformation Hour. The Shame of the National Council of Churches … Collingswood, NJ: [1961]. 7 pp. illus. pamphlet; The problem of teen-age purity: The teachings of Pope Pius XII. New Rochelle, NY: Salesiana Publishers and Distributors, [1961]; Cross, John. A Fearful Crime to Offend God in Order to Please Men. Kenosha: WI: Cross Publications, 1961. 32 pp. stapled booklet; How the ‘Levelers’ Are Destroying America. N.p., n.d. [ca. 1968]. [4] pp. pamphlet; Sex Education in the Schools: Some Thoughts from Eminent Doctors and From MOTOREDE. Belmont, MA: MOTOREDE, n.d. [ca. 1969]. [4] pp. pamphlet; Manion Forum: Weekly Broadcast No. 791. South Bend, IN: 1969. [4] pp. newsletter; Hargis, Billy James. Sex Replaces Prayer in Public Schools. [Christian Crusade], 1969. [4] pp. newsletter; The Fact Finder. Must Our Schools Teach our Children Sex without Morality? Phoenix, AZ: 1969. [8] pp. pamphlet, illus.; American Education Lobby. Sex Education: Assault on American Youth. Washington, D.C.: American Education Lobby, n.d. [ca. 1969]. [4] pp. folio newsletter; Drake, Dr. Gordon V. SIECUS: Corrupter of Youth. Tulsa, OK: Christian Crusade, 1969. 63 pp. stapled booklet with bibliography; Hargis, Billy James. Sex Revolution in the United States. Tulsa, OK: Christian Crusade, 1970. First Edition. 53 pp. booklet, some b/w illus.