Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov, Inscribed 1st Edition 1st State

1st Edition. Hardcover. Signed by Author. [Beaton, Cecil] Stein, Gertrude. WARS I HAVE SEEN. Signed. London: Batsford, 1945. “A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war”. First Edition. 8vo., 191pp. Blue cloth stamped darker blue title to spine. A near fine copy in a superb, bright panorama dust wrapper illustrated by Cecil Beaton. [Bookseller’s sticker at the top of the inside flap].

Inscribed in a later hand by Stein in blue fountain pen at the bottom of her Cecil Beaton frontis. portrait, to John James, an American journalist living in France to whom she inscribed a number of books: “To John James who says Ma”am so ? from Kentucky / Always / Gertrude Stein / May / 46″. Stein lived until July of 1946. Probably the toughest Stein Item to find signed & virtually impossible to find as a Presentation Copy.

An extremely good example. In “Wars I Have Seen” (1945), her memoir of the Second World War, Gertrude Stein writes of the remarkable kindness of a young Frenchman named Paul Genin, the owner of a silk factory in Lyons and a country neighbor, who came to her after America entered the war and asked if she needed money. She did – the funds from America on which she and Alice B. Toklas depended no longer arrived – and he offered her a matching monthly stipend. Stein and Toklas lived on Genin’s kindness for six months, after which Stein sold a Cézanne (“quite quietly to some one who came to see me”) and no longer needed money. “And so I thanked Paul Genin and paid him back and he said if you ever need me just tell me, and that was that.”