Sketches in Prose and Verse (Signed first edition)

San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1897. First edition. Very Good +. Signed on the title-page by Anita Ciprico Black. Publisher's cloth over flexible boards. 175 x 215 mm. 50 pp. With a photographic frontispiece of Mission Dolores in San Francisco. Some edgewear. Creasing to front flyleaf and a bit of foxing to first couple leaves. A very good, clean copy of an uncommon book.

This appears to be the only book by the California writer Anita Ciprico Black. The collection comprises eight poems and four short prose pieces, two of which reflect on the relationships between white Americans and the diverse communities that would have surrounded Black in turn-of-the-century California. The story "Who is the Christian?" tells of a Chinese immigrant man caring for a wealthy, infirm white woman; "Lupé: A Tale of Mission Dolores" is the tragic story of a young Spanish girl, the daughter of missionaries, whose romantic hopes are dashed when conflicts between Spaniards and nefarious "Americanos" come between her and her Bostonian lover. Very Good +.