Leda and the Swan

[Florence]: Privately Printed, 1937. First separate edition (edition of 22), this one "special copy in Tuscany" so designated by Prokosch, and signed by him in red ink beneath. With a small watercolor frontispiece drawing signed beneath in pencil, Frederic Prokosch. [8] pages. 1 vols. 16mo. Original gold-on-black geometric-design wrappers, printed paper label on front cover. Prokosch bookplate, signed by him, with his annotations on flyleaf, altering date to 1937. A few spots of light, scattered foxing on front and rear flyleaves, else a fine, bright copy. First separate edition (edition of 22), this one "special copy in Tuscany" so designated by Prokosch, and signed by him in red ink beneath. With a small watercolor frontispiece drawing signed beneath in pencil, Frederic Prokosch. [8] pages. 1 vols. 16mo. Frederic Prokosch (1908-1989) was a cosmopolitan American novelist, whose first novel The Asiatics was published to great acclaim in 1935. Prokosch, educated at Haverford and Yale, produced a series of "Butterfly Books" hand bound in brightly colored papers, including his own writings and the works of modernist poets such as Auden and T. S. Eliot. William Butler Yeats won the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Wade states: "Mr. Prokosch tells me that at the moment the printing was finished he was called to America on his father's death and went leaving all his books and papers behind him. In 1948 he returned to Florence and discovered the copies of the booklet still intact".

The colophon indicates: "Of this poem twenty-two copies were printed for the author: five copies bound in Sicily paper, numbered 1-5; five bound in Sardinia, numbered I-V; five bound in Abruzzo, numbered a-e; five bound in Umbria, numbered A-E; and two bound in Marche, numbered x and XX. This is number". This copy is unnumbered and bears Prokosch's ink holograph, "special copy in Tuscany", signed by him. It is his own copy with his heraldic lion bookplate. Wade 185 (dated to 1935); Barker, Butterfly Books 48 ("special copy")