Poems: First and Second Series (The Living Library)

Second American Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. This 1948 first printing of the Second American Edition of the Poems of Emily Dickinson is the first to come fully illustrated by Leon Jacobson and donning this moody midcentury dust jacket, depicting the poetess as a gothic heroine, fists upraised upon a forested mountain under a full moon. This Living Library edition contains all 281 poems as originally published in the first and second series, co-edited by "her friends," Dickinson's literary mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the woman who had an affair with her brother Austin, Mabel Loomis Todd, what would become known as the First Series by 1890, and the Second Series the following year. In his introduction to this 1948 edition, Living Library editor Carl Van Doren recognizes Dickinson's literary work as "one of the most precious books of modern poetry in English or any other language," and her life's work: "What she did is all any poet can do. Whether a poet's garden is wide or narrow, [s]he must, to be a good poet, treat it as a universe." 7 1/2" X 5 1/8". 256pp. Presents nicely in protective archival sleeved dust jacket. Mild wear to dark Romantic color pictorial dust jacket, with open tears to top corners, surface scratching to panels, and chipping to head and tail of sunned spine, no losses. Bound in mushroom brown cloth over boards, with vignette of a woman waving across a sea stamped in dark brown to upper board, lettered in gilt and dark brown, with spine lettered in kind below a vignette of Dickinson stamped in dark brown. Mild wear to binding, with shallow fraying to head and tail of spine and gentle rubbing to extremities. Brown topstain. Binding is firm and sound. Midcentury bookplate to front pastedown. Pages are clean and unmarked. Illustrated in vignettes by Leon Jacobsen and a multi-page facsimile of Dickson's writing of her poem "Renunciation." With publisher's code HCI to copyright page, per Myerson A 1.3.a, page 20.…