i: Six nonlectures de cummings, e. e.; MOREHOUSE, Marion (author photograph) - 1953

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. FIRST TRADE EDITION, MARION MOREHOUSE PHOTOGRAPH of CUMMINGS laid in. 8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in white. Pushing to spine ends, edges tanned, scant spotting to leading edge. Foxing and offsetting to feps, from obituary clipping (Cyril Connolly's 'On the Death of a Poet,' Sunday Times), laid in. Black and white matt photographic portrait of cummings (16.4 x 12cm) also laid in: pin hole to bottom left corner. Else, clean and tight. In the original monochrome dust jacket, featuring Morehouse's portrait of cummings (another in the series) to rear panel: spine toned, edgewear, creasing and nicking, spine ends chipped, two closed tears, foxed to rear. Very good/ good Unusual with one of Morehouse's portraits of Cummings laid in, which is rare itself. Model, actor and photographer, Marion Morehouse (1903-1969) was cummings' third wife; they married in 1934. Frequently described as "the first supermodel", she worked with the fashion photographers Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, and Baron George Hoyningen-Huene and appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair. After her modelling career ended, Morehouse took up photography, tutored by Steichen, and had a studio in New York; indeed, her income was important for their household following cummings' mother's death, when his amall annual stipend ended. Both the laid-in photograph and the photograph of cummings on the dust jacket are part of a series of frank portraits of her husband. The image-making was reciprocal, with cummings often painting his wife. Comprising the text of six Charles Eliot Norton "nonlectures," which cummings gave at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, during the autumn of 1952 and the following spring. A signed, limited first edition of 350 copies was issued in the same year.