Anatole France The Red Lily, Modern Library in Limp Leather, 1919–1925

The Piece

An early Modern Library edition of The Red Lily by Anatole France, published in New York by Boni and Liveright. The binding is the series' original limp imitation leather in near black, finely pebbled and flexible enough to roll open in one hand, with the Modern Library torchbearer colophon stamped in gilt at the center of the front board and the title, author and series lettered in gilt on the spine.

Open it and the endpapers are the real find. Green printed on tan, they run across both leaves in a dense allegorical design of striding nude figures, a city skyline, mountains and a great block letter M on the left and L on the right, signed in the plate at the lower left by the artist. A previous owner's circular date stamps sit in the upper corner of the right endpaper.

The text block is clean and square with the original gilt top edge. The verso of the title page carries the line Printed in the United States of America, and the facing page advertises the publisher's forty page illustrated catalog of the series.

History & Provenance

Two features date this copy, and together they close the window tightly.

The title page reads Boni and Liveright. Albert Boni and Horace Liveright founded the Modern Library in 1917 and sold the series to Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer in 1925, so that imprint alone places the book between those years.

The endpapers narrow it further. They are the design by Horace Brodzky, chosen through a competition Boni and Liveright announced in Publisher's Weekly on 8 March 1919, offering one hundred dollars for the best endpaper interpreting the spirit and character of the Modern Library. Brodzky's design was used from 1919 until 1925, printed in green on tan and no other color, and it was retired at the moment Cerf and Klopfer took over. An Australian born painter and printmaker who worked in London and New York, Brodzky is now better remembered as the friend, model and first biographer of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Imprint and endpaper agree: this copy was printed between 1919 and 1925.

The timing is worth noting. Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, squarely inside that window, and the Modern Library was selling him hard to American readers on the strength of it. The Red Lily, first published in Paris in 1894 as Le Lys Rouge, is his best known novel of passion: Therese Martin-Belleme, married off by her father to an elderly government minister, takes a lover out of pity for his devotion, leaves him for a sculptor she actually loves, and is undone when the first man follows her to Florence and will not let go. The red lily is the emblem of that city.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Early Modern Library in the limp leather is one of the great small pleasures of American publishing. The books were made to be carried and read, not shelved and admired, and the binding has the soft give of something designed for a coat pocket. A century on, that is exactly what makes them good objects: the wear is the design working.

What lifts this copy above a shelf filler is the Brodzky endpaper. It is a genuine piece of early twentieth century graphic design, it was only printed for six years, and it disappeared the moment Random House's founders bought the series. Open the book on a stand and that is what people look at.

It belongs in a stack of worn cloth and leather on a side table, in a shelf of early Modern Library spines, or open on a desk. For a dealer, a title page that names Boni and Liveright and an endpaper that dates itself to a six year window is a thirty second story, and the Nobel on top of it does the rest.