Gertrude Stein

A first edition, George Platt Lynes' copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

• Gertrude Stein (American).
• New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.
• Octavo.
• Gray cloth, stamped in silver on cover and spine, in photographic dust jacket.

Photographer George Platt Lynes' copy, in the original scarce dust jacket, with his personal embossed ownership stamp on the title page.

The American fashion and commercial photographer George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) first met Gertrude Stein when his family sent him to Paris in 1925 to prepare for college, but after dropping out of Yale the following year, he returned to France in 1928, soon embarking on a photography career in which he not only shot cover images for Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, and Town & Country, but also documented many of the most prominent gay writers and artists of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as George Balanchine's newly founded American Ballet company. Lynes became acquainted with Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s, and donated many of his male homoerotic photographs — which he considered his greatest achievement as a photographer — to the Kinsey Institute just prior to his premature death from lung cancer in 1955.

A wonderful association copy linking two important gay icons of the 1930s.