FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. Pictures of the Gone World. San Francisco: The City Lights Pocket Bookshop. 1955.
Small 4to., original black publisher's card wraps with titles and price direct in yellow; overlaid yellow title sticker lettered in black; unpaginated [pp. xl]; with poems numbered in black; a near-fine example, internally clean, with some pencil marks to prelims (some now erased): label a little bubbled, with one black scratch mark to the upper cover; 'Lawrence Ferlinghetti/ 7 May 63/ New Haven' in ink to title-page; City Lights 'Review copy' slip loosely inserted.
Review copy of the first edition, one of 1000 copies, signed by Ferlinghetti on the title-page.
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."
An original example in superior condition.
#2120332