Black Sun Press - Caresse Continues Publishing

Caresse Continues Publishing

After Harry Crosby's suicide, Caresse dedicated herself to the Black Sun Press. She published the first edition of Hart Crane's book-length poem The Bridge, replete with tipped-in photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge taken by Walker Evans, his public debut.

She followed that by releasing a "collected Crosby"—four books that reprinted earlier collections. One of these collections had been originally introduced by D. H. Lawrence. To accompany it, Caresse solicited essays for the other three from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Stuart Gilbert. Caresse published two volumes of Harry Crosby's poetry, Chariot of the Sun and Transit of Venus. He had dedicated the latter volume to his lover, Josephine Rotch Bigelow.

In 1943, during the Second World War, she designed and published the first English-language edition of the surrealist collaboration betweenMax Ernst and Paul Eluard book, Misfortunes of the Immortals, first published in 1920. Translated by Hugh Chisholm, it featured newly added content, "Three Drawings Twenty Years Later", by Ernst. Due to limited availability of quality paper during war-time, it was printed by handset letterpress at the Gemor Press, on "exceptionally cheap wartime newsprint."

The Black Sun Press broadened its scope after Harry's death. Although it published few works after 1952, it printed James Joyce's Collected Poems in 1963. It did not officially close until Caresse's death on January 24, 1970 at age 78.

She had also established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, which published paperback books by European writers including Alain Fournier, Charles-Louis Philippe, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Paul Eluard, George Grosz, Max Ernst, C. G. Jung and Americans like Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, and Kay Boyle, among others. Her paperback books, an innovative product in the 1930s, were not well received, and she closed the press in 1933.