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Title: Mushroom: A Book of Free Forms
Author: Alfred Kreymborg
Publisher: John Marshall Co., Ltd.
Printing Year: 1916 First Edition with Letter By Author Laid In

Condition/Details: Bound in pictorial boards, this antique volume is a scarce original edition of a collection of free verse tone poems by Alfred Francis Kreymborg (December 10, 1883 - August 14, 1966). Kreymborg was an American poet, novelist, playwright, literary editor and anthologist. He was the first literary figure to be included in Alfred Stieglitz's 291 circle, and was briefly associated with the Ferrer Center where Man Ray was studying under Robert Henri. From 1913 to 1914, Kreymborg and Man Ray worked together to bring out ten issues of the first of Kreymborg's prominent modernist magazines: The Glebe. Ezra Pound - who had heard about The Glebe from Kreymborg's friend John Cournos - sent Kreymborg the manuscript of Des Imagistes in the summer of 1913 and this famous first anthology of Imagism was published as the fifth issue of The Glebe.

In 1913 Man Ray and Samuel Halpert, another of Henri's students, started an artist's colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey. This colony was often also referred to as "Grantwood" and comprised a number of clapboard shacks on a bluff. Kreymborg moved to Ridgefield and launched Others: A Magazine of the New Verse with Skipwith Cannell, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams in 1915. Pound had, along with the Des Imagistes poems, written to Kreymborg suggesting that he contact "Old Bull" Williams, that is William Carlos Williams. Williams did not live far from Ridgefield, and he became involved in the magazine. Soon there was a group of artists associated with the magazine. Marianne Moore came to Ridgefield for picnics, and in 1915 Marcel Duchamp moved in. Regarding Marianne Moore, she was asked in an interview whether Alfred Kreymborg was her American discoverer, to which she replied, "It could be said, perhaps; he did all he could to promote me. Miss Monroe and the Aldingtons had asked me simultaneously to contribute to Poetry and The Egoist in 1915. Alfred Kreymborg was not inhibited. I was a little different from the others. He thought that I might pass as a novelty, I guess."

Kreymborg's tone-poems, or "mushrooms," had seldom made it into print, but in 1916, soon after his move to Ridgefield, they were brought out in book form by John Marshall as "Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms'" and Williams praised them as a "triumph for America." (biographical information courtesy of Wikipedia.)

The volume shows light external age/wear (with very small water marking along top edge of front cover), and is solidly bound with lightly age-toned pages with occasional pencil marginalia (mostly check marks). Title page has tipped-in publisher's slip by Knopf over name of original publisher. Pages 15-16 and 17-18 show repairs to tears at top of pages (the latter shows larger tear across upper right-hand corner). The book measures approximately 5 1/4" x 7 3/4" and contains 142 pages. Shipping cost (within the U.S.) for this lot will be: $4.50