Limited plain edition of&nbsp;Operas and Plays&nbsp;inscribed by Stein's partner, Alice Toklas.<ul><li>Gertrude Stein (American).</li><li>Paris: 27 Rue de Fleurus, 1932.</li><li>Limited to 500 copies.</li><li>Inscribed by Toklas on half-title“To George Whol with the same lovely pen and this&nbsp;/ time and always with gratitude and remembrance / Alice Toklas."</li><li>Original printed tan wrappers with the original card slipcase.</li></ul>

Operas and Plays

A <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&amp;-manuscripts/book/first-edition?locale=en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">first edition</a>, George Platt Lynes' copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=Gertrude%20Stein&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gertrude Stein</a>.<ul><li>Gertrude Stein (American).</li><li>New York:&nbsp;Harcourt, Brace and Company,&nbsp;1933.</li><li>Octavo.</li><li>Gray cloth, stamped in silver on cover and spine, in photographic dust jacket.</li></ul> 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 &amp; 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.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas First Edition

A first edition of this first book from Stein's Plain Edition, inscribed by Alice Toklas to author Elizabeth Sprigge, who would publish one of the earliest formal biographies of Stein.<ul><li>Gertrude Stein (American).</li><li>Lucy Church Amiably: A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving.</li><li>Paris: Imprimerie Union / (Plain Edition), 1930.&nbsp;</li><li>240 pages.</li><li>Part of an edition of 1,000 copies.&nbsp;</li><li>Inscribed by Alice B. Toklas on the front free endpaper: "Once again with love to Elizabeth [Sprigge] / Devotedly / Alice / Saint-Medard 54 – Paris."</li><li>Bound in the publisher's original blue printed boards.</li></ul> After Stein's death, Alice Toklas stewarded Stein's posthumous literary reputation, both assisting editors of new editions of Stein's texts and providing assistance (or obstacles, as the case may be) to biographers. At the time of this book's inscription, novelist Elizabeth Sprigge was working on her first biography, about the Modernist Swedish author August Strindberg, that would be favorably reviewed for its "remarkably accurate and clear treatment of a controversial figure" (Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 22 No. 1, 28). Toklas's 1954 inscription here — "with love [...] Devotedly" — indicates that Toklas and Sprigge began a friendship on warm terms. Indeed, Toklas was impressed by Sprigge's biography of Strindberg upon its release the next year, and she initially supported Sprigge's idea of writing a biography of Stein because of it. In 1953, Toklas wrote her own editor at Harper to provide a connection for Sprigge to publish her planned biography of Stein; it was, Toklas's biographer remarked, "a recommendation that Alice came to regret" (Simon, 283). As Sprigge continued gathering material for the biography, it became clear that she intended to "include personal details [...] a practice Alice would not allow" (Simon, 284). Toklas warned off friends whom Sprigge was contacting and, in 1956, argued at length with Sprigge regarding the content of the biography — especially her own role in it. Toklas argued she herself "had no place in the book except, perhaps, as the editor of the Plain Edition" (Simon, 284), Stein and Toklas's short-lived small press that published this book. Harper ultimately published Sprigge's Gertrude Stein: Her Life And Work in 1957, much to Toklas's dismay. One of Stein's most underappreciated books, Lucy Church Amiably was the first of the books Stein published herself, frustrated as she was by a lack of a regular outlet for her work. It was available only in this edition until 1969, when Something Else Press republished it.

Lucy Church Amiably, Inscribed by Alice Toklas

An association first edition, inscribed by Alice Toklas to author Elizabeth Sprigge, who would publish one of the earliest formal biographies of Stein in 1957—and which Toklas repudiated.<ul><li>Gertrude Stein (American).</li><li>Paris: Plain Edition, 1932.</li><li>400 pages.</li><li>Inscribed by Toklas in brown ink to first leaf: "To Elizabeth Sprigge, / In memory of the author and the understanding of her work / Alice Toklas / Paris - Bastille Day - 48."</li><li>Bound in the original tan printed wrappers, in the original printed slipcase.&nbsp;</li></ul> After Stein's death, Alice Toklas stewarded Stein's posthumous literary reputation, both assisting editors of new editions of Stein's texts and providing assistance (or obstacles, as the case may be) to biographers. At the time of this book's inscription, novelist Elizabeth Sprigge was working on her first biography, about the Modernist Swedish author August Strindberg, that would be favorably reviewed for its "remarkably accurate and clear treatment of a controversial figure" (Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 22 No. 1, 28). Toklas's inscription here—"In memory of the author and the understanding of her work"—suggests that Toklas was, in 1948, open to the possibility that Sprigge could view Stein in a similar way. Indeed, Toklas was impressed by Sprigge's biography of Strindberg upon its release the next year, and she initially supported Sprigge's idea of writing a biography of Stein because of it. In 1953, Toklas wrote her own editor at Harper to provide a connection for Sprigge to publish her planned biography of Stein; it was, Toklas's biographer remarked, "a recommendation that Alice came to regret" (Simon, 283). As Sprigge continued gathering material for the biography, it became clear that she intended to "include personal details [...] a practice Alice would not allow" (Simon, 284). Toklas warned off friends whom Sprigge was contacting and, in 1956, argued at length with Sprigge regarding the content of the biography—especially her own role in it. Toklas argued she herself "had no place in the book except, perhaps, as the editor of the Plain Edition" (Simon, 284), Stein and Toklas's short-lived small press that published this book, Operas and Plays. Harper ultimately published Sprigge's Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work in 1957, much to Toklas's dismay. Printed in a run of only 500 copies, Operas Aand Plays was the fourth book of five that Stein and Toklas's Plain Editions imprint issued. Stein had by this time become frustrated by the limitations of getting her work accepted by mainstream publishers and decided to take the means in hand herself: to raise funds for the establishment and operation of the press, Stein famously sold her Picasso painting Woman with a Fan (Dydo, 418).

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