The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby (née Mary Phelps Jacob), American expatriates living in Paris. In April 1927 they named their press after their black whippet Narcisse, and they used the press as an avenue to publish their own poetry in small editions of finely-made, hard-bound volumes. They enjoyed the reception their initial work received, and decided to expand the press to serve other authors, renaming the company the Black Sun Press, following on Harry's obsession on the symbolism of the sun.
They printed limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. In 1928, as Éditions Narcisse, they printed a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. Publishing in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s put the company at the crossroads of many emerging American writers who were living abroad. They published early works of a number of writers before they were well-known, including James Joyce's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake. They published Kay Boyle's first book-length work, Short Stores, in 1929. and works by Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Laurence Sterne, and Eugene Jolas. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. After Harry died in a suicide pact with one of his many lovers, Caresse Crosby continued publishing into the 1940s.
Read more about Black Sun Press: Publish Own Works, Expand Press, Support Experimental Writing, Expand Literary Circle, Beautiful Books in Limited Editions, Affair and Suicide, Caresse Continues Publishing, Reputation, Later Value, Works
Famous quotes containing the words black, sun and/or press:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one’s knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghost- writers and press agents so that it is getting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)