Sonny, a Christmas Guest - inscribed with drawing by Stuart, also signed by Carolyn Wells, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mina M. Edison, Harriet C. Sprague, Anna Waitt, Louise W. Jones, Virginia Kent Magee & one other
New York: The Century Co., 1908. Hardcover. Very good, light wear and soil. The copy of Mabel Narcissa Cox, the wife of Frank A. Vanderlip, a well known NY banker noted for having played a large part in the founding of the Federal Reserve, and for establishing the first Montessori school in the US; his bookplate is on the pastedown. Probably from a gathering of the women who signed this book at the Vanderlip home in the Hudson Valley. Stuart has inscribed the book with a drawing. Signed in pencil by Harriet C. Sprague, spouse of Frank Sprague, an important inventor in the fields of electric trams, motors and elevators, by Mina Edison, spouse of an even more important inventor (!), Carolyn Wells, the well known writer, Anna Waitt (to whom Wells's "The Lover's Baedeker" is dedicated), Frances Hodgson Burnett, Harriet Ford (noted actress of the time, Louise W. Jones (we can only find a listing for her in NY Social Registers of the time), Virginia Kent Magee, an active suffragist, and one other: Katharine ___?. The rear endpaper is filled with an amusing set of verses, many nodding to the women present, and probably written by the hostess of the occasion (see photo). There is also, on one of the early blanks, an imagined exchange between a Mrs. Dodge and a Mrs. Stuart, in which Stuart replies, "I write children black but I have them white" -- which speaks to Stuart's appropriating black dialect and her native Louisianan African-Americans in much of her work, especially in "Sonny," her most famous book, which was first published in 1896. Very Good. Item #H8462
Price: $400.00