George Gershwin had wanted to write an opera about the African-American experience long before he read DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy in 1926. But in Heyward’s portrayal of life on “Catfish Row”—based on the very real Cabbage Row in Heyward’s hometown of Charleston—Gershwin recognized his material. He immediately wrote to Heyward to suggest a joint project. Heyward agreed to the proposal, but both he and Gershwin were busy with other projects and the two men delayed their collaboration.

In 1934 Gershwin finally began work on the opera. When Porgy and Bess premiered in 1935, it was not successful, but it was controversial. Some questioned the use of African-American dialect and even Gershwin’s use of the opera form was criticized as being unconvincing and too “popular.” In the end, Gershwin and Heyward both lost money on the project. It was not until years after Gershwin’s death that the opera became popular with audiences, and it was decades before it finally received acceptance within the opera world. Today, Porgy and Bess represents the best that American opera has to offer.

We offer a deluxe limited edition of the piano-vocal score, signed on the limitation page by George and Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Rouben Mamoulian, who produced the premiere. This copy is additionally inscribed and signed again by both George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. Because of Gershwin’s tragic early death in 1937, inscribed copies of any of his works are exceedingly rare. View our current Porgy and Bess inventory.

In 1925 Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby to immediate critical acclaim and popular success. Eight years later, he was no closer to delivering another novel. His editor at Scribner’s, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, worried about Fitzgerald but never lost faith, writing to him in August of 1933, “Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them; but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time.”

Circumstances, indeed: in the intervening years the country plunged into the Great Depression, his wife Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and had to enter a sanitarium for long-term care, and Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism and the difficulty of ever surmounting his own reputation following the near-miraculous Gatsby. “The man who started the novel,” he remarked after publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934, “is not the man who finished it.” Reception was mixed and while the novel sold well for the Depression era, Fitzgerald had hoped for so much more.

It was the last novel he would publish in his lifetime, perhaps the final solid step before the dissolution that would so closely parallel the tragic decline of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Browse our current inventory.

George Macy’s decision to commission Henri Matisse to illustrate Ulysses was a bold move for his fledgling Limited Editions Club in 1935. Scandal still swirled around James Joyce’s masterpiece, which had been banned in the United States until 1933. In preliminary conversation with Macy, Matisse confessed to not having read Ulysses; Macy provided him with a French translation. “The very next morning, M. Matisse reported that he had read the book, that he understood its eighteen episodes to be parodies of similar episodes in the Odyssey, that he would like to give point to this fact by making his illustrations actually illustrations of the original episodes in Homer!” (Macy).

Matisse created 26 beautiful full-page illustrations, including six soft-ground etchings – his only use of that particular medium. Macy had planned for 1500 copies of the work to be produced and signed by both author and illustrator. Matisse signed all 1500, but legend has it that when Joyce realized that Matisse had been working from Homer’s Odyssey rather than his novel, he refused to sign any more than the 250 or so that he had already signed – making double-signed copies of this lavish illustrated edition very scarce.

We often carry copies of this collaboration between two of the 20th-century’s finest artists, one of the great modern illustrated books, signed by both author and illustrator. Browse our current inventory.