Kahlil Gibran The Voice of the Master, Citadel Press Gift Edition, Oxblood Gilt, c. 1963–1980

The Piece

Kahlil Gibran's The Voice of the Master in the Citadel Press gift edition, a small, thick pocket volume bound in padded oxblood leatherette and stamped in gilt with the author's name in a banner, the title in flowing script within a double-ruled frame, and fleurons at the corners and foot. The binding is the one Citadel gave the Gibran titles for the gift trade in the 1960s and 1970s, meant to be carried in a coat pocket or kept on a nightstand, and the gilt on this copy is bright and complete. Inside, Anthony Rizcallah Ferris's translation from the Arabic of Gibran's early parables, aphorisms and meditations on love, death, art and the life of the spirit, gathered under the title of its opening section, with the Citadel Press imprint at 222 Park Avenue South and the distributor's notice for Book Sales, Inc.

Condition is very good: the leatherette supple and unscuffed, the gilt sharp, the spine straight, the binding tight and the pages clean with light toning, no inscriptions or marks found. A clean copy of a book that was usually read to pieces.

History & Provenance

Kahlil Gibran left Lebanon for Boston as a boy in 1895, painted and wrote in both Arabic and English, and with The Prophet in 1923 became the most widely read poet of the twentieth century, a book that has never been out of print and has sold in the tens of millions. After his death in 1931 his Arabic writings were brought into English by a succession of translators, and the Lebanese American scholar Anthony R. Ferris, working with Gibran's literary executors, produced in the 1950s a series of volumes for Citadel Press that gave American readers the early work: Spirits Rebellious, The Broken Wings, Thoughts and Meditations and The Voice of the Master, first published in 1958. Citadel, the New York house founded in 1945, kept the Ferris translations in print for decades in small gift bindings like this one, sold through bookshops, card shops and department stores and given at graduations, weddings and funerals, and they made Gibran a presence in American homes that no other foreign poet has matched.

The dating rests on the imprint rather than style alone: the copyright page carries the 1958 Ferris copyright, the Citadel Press address at 222 Park Avenue South and a distributor's notice for Book Sales, Inc. with a five-digit postal code, which places this printing after the introduction of the ZIP code in 1963, and the padded gilt leatherette is the Citadel gift binding of the following two decades. The book is dated c. 1963–1980.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A small red and gold book is the finishing touch of a nightstand, a desk, a tray on an ottoman or a stack under a lamp, and this one is Gibran, so it is also the book a guest picks up and reads a page of before sleep. The oxblood and gilt sit with brass, walnut, leather and old glass, and with the scarlet and linen cloth of mid-century hardcovers on a shelf. It is a gift for a reader, a graduate, a newlywed or anyone who keeps The Prophet by the bed, and for a shop or designer client it is the small, bright, meaningful book that styles a vignette and sells on the name.