The Collected Poems: Chariot of the Sun; Transit of Venus; Sleeping Together; Torchbearer. This item is unavailable.The Collected Poems: Chariot of the Sun; Transit of Venus; Sleeping Together; Torchbearer

Each volume hand-numbered no. 40 of 500 copies on Navarre (probably the entire edition, per Minkoff; see note below). Four octavo volumes. Publisher's printed wrappers with French flaps, in original unprinted glassine dustwrappers; v.III (Sleeping Together) includes a gravure portrait frontispiece; v.IV (Torchbearer) with one inserted photographic plate. Later custom cloth slipcase. Uniform darkening to glassine at spine panels; small chips to spine ends, else a uniformly fine, fresh set, uncommon thus. Housed snugly in a later custom cloth slipcase, just a touch soiled, still Near Fine. Prefaces by D.H. Lawrence (Chariot); T.S. Eliot (Transit); Ezra Pound (Torchbearer); and Stuart Gilbert (Sleeping Together). A very nicely-preserved set of the Deluxe Edition of Harry Crosby's poems, issued by his widow Caresse two years after his death in a double suicide with his lover, a recent Bryn Mawr graduate named Josephine Rotch. The ensuing, highly publicized scandal made the Crosbys a household name in America, and their bohemian - ultimately nihilistic - lifestyle, which included a great deal of opium and an equal amount of indiscriminate sex, came to symbolize the Lost Generation of the Twenties. Though the colophons specify two more rarefied issues - twenty copies on Japanese vellum and fifty copies on Van Gelder Zonen - Minkoff states "it is quite likely that neither [of these] were ever issued," and the issue on Navarre, for which 500 sets of sheets were printed (it is not entirely clear that all were ultimately bound) comprise the entire edition. Neither Minkoff's bibliography, nor the publisher's prospectus found with some copies (not present here), mention a slipcase; however we have noted sets in commerce with what is clearly a publisher's slipcase. MINKOFF A42.…