Songs for Certain Children

[San Francisco]: Adrian Wilson, 1947. First edition. Cover title; 9 sheets ; 31 x 23 cm. Issued within two printed covers. Full title page is on inner cover. The first book by poet James Broughton, and the first book printed by Adrian Wilson. Broughton, who had written some plays that the Wilsons' theatre goup, The Interplayers, had produced, wanted the work printed. The typographer Jack Stauffacher lent Wilson the cuts for the book, which was set by Mackenzie and Harris in Centaur and Arrighi type. Broughton and Wilson worked out the design, along with Pauline Kael, the film critic, who was Broughton's girl friend at the time. The pages were all printed on different colored construction papers. Although the poems are not meant to be read by or to children, Joyce Wilson, then beginning her life-long career at the Laurel Hill Nursery School, engaged her pupils in doing paintings for the covers. In this copy, inscribed by Broughton to his Stanford friend (later president of San Francisco State College) Frank Fenton, "from his oldest living child" the cover painting is finely executed in colored inks and is surely an adult's work - probably Broughton's - not a child's. Small breaks in the spine fold; some mild edge fading. Although WorldCat locates twenty copies of an edition thought to be no more than fifty, most of those derive from a remainder of uncolored copies discovered among Broughton's papers when his archive was sold in the 1970s, and being thus unfinished cannot be considered "complete, as issued"