FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. Pictures of the Gone World. San Francisco: The City Lights Pocket Bookshop. 1956.
Small 4to., plain stapled paper wraps printed in black to both covers; unpaginated [pp. xl]; the poems numbered 1-27; the covers a little toned to edges (more so to lower cover) with some light shelf marking and dirt marks; internally rather clean; "To Arnold + Nancy Per/ Truly - Lawrence Ferlinghetti" in pencil to upper cover, poem "Don't let that horse…" in Ferlinghetti's hand inside the upper cover.
Second edition, priced 50c, a unique presentation copy inscribed in pencil by Ferlinghetti on the upper cover, and with the manuscript poem "Don't let that horse…" written in pencil in his hand inside the upper cover.
In 1951 Ferlinghetti settled in San Francisco, opening the City Lights Pocket Book Shop in 1953. It quickly became a gathering place for the city’s literary avant-garde. Under his new imprint, the City Lights press, he began to publish poetry, and Pictures of the Gone World was released just a couple of years later. His new Pocket Poet Series introducing a series which was to form the iconoclastic body of work which promoted names as ground-breaking as O'Hara, Patchen, Kaufman, William Carlos Williams and Ginsberg to name merely a few. By the time it series ended in 1982 it had stretched to 40 titles and included Allen Ginsberg's infamous Howl (number four in the series).
Ferlinghetti’s own lucid, good-natured, witty verse was, like many of his contemporaries, written in a conversational style that was designed to be read aloud. It became extremely popular in coffehouses and campus auditoriums and "struck a responsive chord in disaffected youth."
The poem "Don't let that horse…", written in pencil in this copy, contains a few manuscript corrections, some of which do not appear in the later published version. It is unclear whether the poet was still revising the poem at the time of the inscription.
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