[Rarebooks] fa: UNDER EGYPT’S SKIES - Lydia E. Painter - Privately Printed: 1 of 250 Copies 1910

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, December 1. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/suob44h

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Lydia Ethel F. Painter: Under Egypt's Skies. (Wausau [Wisconsin]: Helen Bruneau van Vechten, at the Philosopher Press, 1910.) First and only edition. Large royal 8vo (27 cm) in original full brown morocco, spine lettered in gilt, turn-ins with gilt-tooled "hieroglyphic" decorations, moiré silk paste-downs and endpapers, top page edges gilt; [14], 134, [6] pp.; with a portrait frontispiece and tissue-guarded plates. One of 250 copies "privately printed for [the author's] son Kenyon V. Painter," this being no. 80.

Rhapsodic, posthumously published account of travels in Egypt by an enthusiastic amateur egyptologist, sumptuously printed by her son. The author died the year before the book was issued, so, unless it's some kind of spirit writing, we have to assume her signature on the frontispiece is a printed facsimile. The Painters were a wealthy Cleveland family, though apparently not all their wealth was gained on the up-and-up: Kenyon Vickers Painter, the son who commissioned this book, was later convicted and sent to prison for misappropriating funds from the Union Trust Co., a bank of which he was the largest stockholder.

Binding with bumping to the corners, some sunning to the spine and boards, small stain to the front, front joint cracked but holding; contents with some browning to the deckled edges of the leaves, else very clean and sound. An uncommon item, to say the least.