Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin

48 pp., small 8vo. With an introduction by Scott Nearing. Poems of the well-known Wobbly (the first poem, "Mourn Not the Dead," was set to music and recorded in the 1990s by Steven Taylor, poet and member of the revived Fugs). Front hinge of binding partially cracked, otherwise very good, in a near very good jacket with small edge chips and closed tears. This copy inscribed by Evelyn Preston to Spencer Miller, Jr., in November of 1922, with the question: "Tell me how long we are to keep Christ writhing on the Cross?" Preston was a philanthropist, reformer, and labor activist, friend of the Roosevelts, who married Roger Baldwin, also a Wobbly and the founder of the ACLU. She helped Fannia Cohn and others to establish the Workers' Education Bureau in 1921, of which Spencer Miller was a director. A nice association.