Murder Aunt, Signed (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Oblong octavo. String-tied cloth photograph album or scrapbook with blank black pages. Five pages of single-spaced typed text, each page of text facing a captioned ink drawing by Dawn Powell; along with a large manuscript label on the front board. Label a little darkened and smudged, small nicks and tears on the album pages, and a little toning to the text, overall very good for the materials used. A highly curious and very eccentric illustrated manuscript by Dawn Powell, from the effects of her longtime friend, and reputed lover Coburn Gilman. Though styled as a children's story, it is anything but, and displays an improvisational and mercurial nature, beginning "Now shut up said the Colonel, and let me tell one. Kiddies, he continued, how many here can tell me what is the capitol of South Carolina? Knowing that a story was under way the kiddies settled back and ordered a fresh round in a rather tough joint not half a mile from where the Colonel was speaking." The thoroughly disjointed narrative involves, in part, the efforts by the Colonel to ascertain for Good King Irving who "had been stealing ergots from the Men's Locker." The typescript concludes: "Let your betters talk, advised the Colonel tossing her [little Alice, aged 1 month] out the window with a twinkle. And that is why they call me Sammy the Stout-heart or who cocked Bob Tiller, a chidren's story," followed by a four-line manuscript postscript. Powell's drawings are imaginative and whimsical, and not a little influenced by her friendly colleague James Thurber. While this volume is of questionable literary merit, the album has considerable charm, and was likely prepared as a one-off gift for her boon companion Gilman. Early manuscript material by Powell - even as eccentric as this one - is highly uncommon on the market.