E.E. Cummings

A collector's set of some of the poet's treasured texts once owned by José García Villa, a close friend of Cummings, and to whom they are all inscribed.

• Sold as a set of 9.
• E.E. Cummings (American).

Is 5.

New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1926.

Octavo.

Inscribed on the flyleaf.

Bound in original orange cloth, spine stamped gilt.

Him.

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Octavo.

Signed twice: inscribed on the flyleaf and signed at the limitation statement.

Number 36 of 160 numbered copies signed by the author.

Title in red and black, some pages unopened.

Includes a note left for Villa, requesting that he call “Mrs. Cummings.”

In original quarter-vellum over blackboards, decorations in gilt to front board, in green paper wrapper, with decorative slipcase.

W (ViVa).

New York: Horace Liveright Inc., 1931.

Tall quarto.

Inscribed on the flyleaf.

Bound in linen-backed brown boards with silver printed dustjacket.

Tom.

New York: Arrow Editions, 1935.

Octavo.

Inscribed on initial blank.

Frontispiece by Ben Shahn.

Bound in original brown cloth boards, silver lettered cover, brown endpapers.

No Thanks.

New York: The Golden Eagle Press, 1935.

Oblong octavo.

Inscribed on the flyleaf.

Bound in original linen boards, red stamped spine and cover, blue edges.

Tulips and Chimneys.

Mount Vernon: The Golden Eagle Press, 1937.

Octavo.

Inscribed on initial blank.

Titles in black and green.

Bound in original vellum-backed green boards, pale green endpapers.

1 x 1.

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1944.

Octavo.

Inscribed on the flyleaf.

With newspaper clippings and ephemera laid in.

Includes a letter from Holt addressed to Villa, which accompanied this advance copy they sent him on behalf of the author.

Bound in original blue cloth boards, jacket with illustrated portrait on rear panel.

Six Nonlectures.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Octavo.

Inscribed on the flyleaf.

Bound in original black cloth, black and white printed dustjacket.

Poems 1923-1954.

New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1954.

Octavo.

Inscribed on the flyleaf.

Bound in original red cloth, dustjacket with photographic portrait on front panel, top edge red.

José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press." Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973, he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

This item is final sale and not eligible for return.

José García Villa