The Pisan Cantos
New York: New Directions, 1948. Very Good + / Very Good +. Item #50516 New York: New Directions, 1948. First Edition, printed in a run of 1,525 copies. Octavo (22cm); black boards in oatmeal paper dust jacket with $2.75 price intact; 118pp. Dust jacket rubbed and lightly toned. A few minor chips throughout. Boards bumped. Binding sound. Textblock and endsheets toned; interior pages clean. Very Good or better.
Written in 1945 while Pound was being held in an American military detention center in Italy, and so-named because of the internment's proximity to Pisa. A year after publication, The Pisan Cantos was awarded the inaugural Bollingen Prize for Poetry by the Library of Congress. (The prize is now given biannually by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.)
[Gallup A60a]
Price: $400.00