Stein, Gertrude

A first edition of this first book from Stein's Plain Edition, inscribed by Alice Toklas to author Elizabeth Sprigge, who would publish one of the earliest formal biographies of Stein.

• Gertrude Stein (American).
• Lucy Church Amiably: A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving.
• Paris: Imprimerie Union / (Plain Edition), 1930. 
• 240 pages.
• Part of an edition of 1,000 copies. 
• Inscribed by Alice B. Toklas on the front free endpaper: "Once again with love to Elizabeth [Sprigge] / Devotedly / Alice / Saint-Medard 54 – Paris."
• Bound in the publisher's original blue printed boards.

After Stein's death, Alice Toklas stewarded Stein's posthumous literary reputation, both assisting editors of new editions of Stein's texts and providing assistance (or obstacles, as the case may be) to biographers. At the time of this book's inscription, novelist Elizabeth Sprigge was working on her first biography, about the Modernist Swedish author August Strindberg, that would be favorably reviewed for its "remarkably accurate and clear treatment of a controversial figure" (Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 22 No. 1, 28). Toklas's 1954 inscription here — "with love [...] Devotedly" — indicates that Toklas and Sprigge began a friendship on warm terms. Indeed, Toklas was impressed by Sprigge's biography of Strindberg upon its release the next year, and she initially supported Sprigge's idea of writing a biography of Stein because of it.

In 1953, Toklas wrote her own editor at Harper to provide a connection for Sprigge to publish her planned biography of Stein; it was, Toklas's biographer remarked, "a recommendation that Alice came to regret" (Simon, 283). As Sprigge continued gathering material for the biography, it became clear that she intended to "include personal details [...] a practice Alice would not allow" (Simon, 284). Toklas warned off friends whom Sprigge was contacting and, in 1956, argued at length with Sprigge regarding the content of the biography — especially her own role in it. Toklas argued she herself "had no place in the book except, perhaps, as the editor of the Plain Edition" (Simon, 284), Stein and Toklas's short-lived small press that published this book. Harper ultimately published Sprigge's Gertrude Stein: Her Life And Work in 1957, much to Toklas's dismay.

One of Stein's most underappreciated books, Lucy Church Amiably was the first of the books Stein published herself, frustrated as she was by a lack of a regular outlet for her work. It was available only in this edition until 1969, when Something Else Press republished it.