Roll, Jordan, Roll

1933. First Edition. Signed. ULMANN, Doris and PETERKIN, Julia. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Robert O. Ballou, (1933). Large quarto, original gilt-lettered three-quarter linen, brown paper-covered boards with imprinted image of an African-American woman on the front cover, top edge gilt, uncut. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $25,000.Signed limited first edition, number 115 only 350 copies (327 of which were offered for sale) signed by both photographer Doris Ulmann and writer of the text Julia Peterkin. With 90 superb tissue-guarded full-page copperplate hand-pulled photogravure plates—this copy with the scarce extra photogravure plate signed in pencil by Ulmann laid in.""Ulmann's photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin… focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina… Peterkin, a popular novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne, one of the state's richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll… Ulmann's soft-focus photos—rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here—straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory"" (Roth). This deluxe edition should not be confused with the trade edition which was issued in a significantly smaller format and with fewer plates which were printed in half-tone as opposed to photogravure. The extra signed photogravure plate that was issued only with this deluxe edition replicates the image that appears opposite page 28. Few copies of this deluxe edition had been distributed at the time of Ulmann's death in 1934; most were donated by her heirs to the Tuskegee Institute to be sold for that school's benefit. Without scarce original slipcase. Plates and text fine, minor foxing and staining to boards. A nearly fine copy of this beautiful work.