Donna the Owl, original handwritten booklet from 1953

(Paris), 1953. First Printing. Wraps. Very good. 7 x 5 inches, tan wraps, hand-bound with blue string. 13 pp. Housed in a yellow mailing envelope with some scattered random notes by Stern. Technically Stern's first book: he wrote it with his former wife Patricia while living in Paris in 1953. Stern wrote the poem, she did the drawings, except for one; she was a former art student at Carnegie Tech, a classmate of Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol. After writing the book, Stern forgot about it for about "fifty years or so" until it was discovered behind some books in his home in Lambertville, NJ. In an introduction to a facsimile reprint published in 2018, Stern wrote: "Donna is a wise little girl, or more appropriately an owl -- the bird of wisdom -- disguised as a little girl, and leading two lives, one as a judge among the animals -- at night -- and one as a good and obedient daughter with her (human) family." Stern, who just died at the beginning of 2023, was one of the greatest poets of his generation. His true first book was not published until he was in his late forties, in 1973.