Dust of New York

New York: Boni & Liveright. Poor. 1919. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [heavily worn, fraying to cloth at spine extremities, hinges a little loosey-goosey, soiling to covers, etc; bookplate of Donn Byrne on front pastedown]. (line drawings) A rare early work by this Romanian-born author, who began his literary career as a journalist in Montreal and later New York in the 1910s, whose stories often focused on immigrant and impoverished communities. (Upon first coming to New York, he lived the life himself, dwelling on the Lower East Side, working in sweatshops, etc.). His first book, "Crimes of Charity" (1917), was an expose of shady practices engaged in by various private charities in the city; this one, his second, collected two dozen of his stories (some of which had appeared in the New York World), and represents his earliest forays into fiction. He was a prolific writer of short stories throughout the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, and became best known for his fictional and non-fictional chronicling of Roma (Gypsy) life and culture. (His 1941 autobiography is entitled "It's the Gypsy in Me.") During the 1920s he ran with the New York literary crowd -- a connection that's somewhat documented by the presence in this very beat-up book of the Ex Libris bookplate of the Irish author Donn Byrne (1889-1928), who lived in New York during the 1910s and early 1920s. One of the book's four illustrations is by Herb Roth (which actually might be reprinted from the New York World, to which both he and Bercovici contributed). ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .