Roll, Jordan, Roll
New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933.
Signed limited first edition. Copy number 346 of only 350 copies, of which 327 were offered for sale, signed by both photographer Doris Ulmann and Julia Peterkin. Printed by letter press and with 90 superb tissue-guarded full-page copperplate hand-pulled photogravure plates and with an additional original signed photogravure. Bound in publisher's original brown paper boards over half cream cloth with spine lettered in gilt. Lacking the original slipcase but housed in a custom cloth chemise case; tissue guards replaced though originals are present and laid into a custom-made compartment in the slipcase.
Near Fine. Neatly recased, light rubbing and color retouching to covers, contents lightly foxed at edges. Toning, light edge wear and light soiling to additional signed photogravure.
“Ulmann's photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, a popular novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne, one of the state's richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. Ulmann's soft-focus photos-rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here-straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory" (Roth, 101 Books).
Price: $35,000.00