Education Of A French Model Kiki’s Memoirs 1962 [ Alice Prin , Hemingway , Samuel Roth ]

Description

Attractive 1962 paperback edition of the era defining memoirs of Alice Prin AKA Kiki de Montparnasse with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway and fraudulent later chapters about their meeting in New York with the archpirate and publisher Samuel Roth.

 

[Prin, Alice]. Putnam, Samuel, trans. The Education of a French Model Kiki’s Memoirs. Belmont Books : New York City. 1962. First edition thus, first printing.

 

Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a model and artist’s muse in Paris most commonly associated with the avant garde art scene of the interwar years. A nude model for artists starting at the age of 14, Kiki’s most famous image is likely Man Ray’s photograph Violin D’Ingres.

This text, the story of her rise to prominence originally published as Kiki’s Memoirs in 1928 and translated in English by Samuel Putnam in 1930 with a foreword by Ernest Hemingway calling it the best recollection of the spirit of Jazz Age, Paris he could find (he would later try his own hand in revisiting the same period in his memoir, A Moveable Feast).

Declared obscene in the United States and banned (and therefore out of copyright), New York bookseller and publisher Samuel Roth began publishing various pirated editions without the author’s name (or any offer of royalties) as he had with other texts like James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (Roth was also the unsuccessful defendant in the 1957 Supreme Court Case Roth vs. The United States, which ruled he could not sell the “obscene” magazine American Aphrodite through the mail).

Unique to Roth’s editions of Kiki’s Memoirs (sold under the title “The Education of a French Model”) are the additional later chapters describing Kiki discovering her  book’s fame and travelling to New York to meet with “that archpirate” Samuel Roth and reunite with Ernest “Papa” Hemingway 23 years after the close of the original narrative.

The prominence of Hemingway’s placement on the cover and in the story are almost undoubtedly connected to his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in late 1961. (The same year as this publication, Roth followed the suicide of Marilyn Monroe with a controversial tell-all supposedly written by her psychiatrist).

 

8vo, 125pp + 2 ads. Perfect bound in printed paper wraps. Wear to corners and spine ends. Bookblock and pages darkened but clean. Small stain fore margin pg 89. Good condition.

 

If you liked this book, you might also enjoy this pirated copy of Shelley’s Queen Mab or this original copy of My Name Is Leona Gage.