Down by the Riverside.
NY: Limited Editions Club, (2001). Oblong folio. 73pp. One of 300 copies. Signed by the artist. Illustrated with four aquatints by Wilson, printed at the Center Street Studio in Milton, Massachusetts by Jim Stroud. Typography and letterpress printing by David Wolfe of Portland, Maine. The restrained color palettes of John Wilson's illustrations elucidate the anxiety and dread that permeate Wright's tale, emphasizing the tension between dignity and violence that characterized his conception of Black life in the American South. "Down by the Riverside" is a deceptively tranquil title for this vignette from Wright's seminal Uncle Tom's Children, first published in 1938, luring the reader in with a promise of a pastoral idyll and then turning face to muse upon the systemic betrayals of racist white Southerners and the cruelly impartial machinations of nature itself. Bound by hand in blue cloth by Carol Joyce. Limited Editions Club Newsletter announcing the book laid in (Number 590, Series 60, Vol. 3, November 2001). Fine in matching blue clamshell box, which is lightly bumped to one corner. Item #32509
Price: $1,500.00