Blue Smoke: A Book of Verse [Inscribed to Witter Bynner with a Binner TLS to another Person, discussing a Book Thief]

First edition. Decorative paper over boards with printed cover label, two foredges unopened. Spine heavily toned and boards with some toning and foxing, modest offsetting on the flyleaves, very good. Poet and translator Witter Bynner's copy with his bookplate on the front pastedown and Inscribed to him: "For Witter Bynner / With the best wishes of / Karle Wilson Baker / December 1919." Laid in is a 1938 two-page TLS from Binner (16mo sheets of his Santa Fe letterhead with the typed envelope present) to Thomas A. Larremore. Binner is responding to Larremore's announcement that he was in possession of a book Inscribed to Binner (presumably this one), and writes in part: "I feel a bit shamefaced to have let a presentation copy of a book to me escape with the inscription. In dismantling our New York apartment, I had to leave a great many books behind, but I had intended to strip personal copies of the [inscribed] pages. since you have the book, I cannot be displeased." On the second page Binner writes a 10-line postscript, inquiring about the author and title of the book in question, and adding an interesting anecdote: "a young poet who had access to my house here stole a number of autographed volumes. Later, after we had met, he wrote me a note to say that he liked me well enough to be returning them and sent back quite a package including a number of Amy Lowell's [sic]. Possibly he did not return them all." Baker's first book of poems; under the pseudonym Charlotte Wilson, she co-authored of *Women and Prisons*, published in London by the Fabian Society in 1912. Baker was born in Little Rock but spent much of her time in Texas; she would go on to publish several more collections of poems as well as several books with Texas themes. An interesting copy.…