Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes. Text by Robert Louis Stevenson. With Twenty-three Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn and a Preface by Janet Adam Smith. Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1954. First edition thus. Small quarto. Original cloth in dustjacket with mounted photo-illustration. 107 pp. + interspersed plates.
Coburn took most of these photographs of Edinburgh in 1905, and later said that he had tried to see the city through Stevenson's eyes; it took almost half a century until the informal project took book form. The pictorial, atmospheric sensibility that was in vogue at the turn-of-the-century is apparent in many of his perfectly composed images. Still an under-appreciated Coburn book.
A fine copy, except for two creases in free front endpaper and a few small edge-tears to the dustjacket. |
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