LOEWINSOHN, Ron.
The Leaves.
SIGNED LIMITED ISSUE — ONE OF 200 NUMBERED HARDCOVER COPIES, THIS NO. 97. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973.
First edition, signed limited issue: one of 200 numbered hardcover copies signed by the poet, this copy number 97 (the limitation number in red). Printed February 1973 in Santa Barbara by Noel Young for Black Sparrow Press; design by Barbara Martin. Large octavo. 27 pp. Original olive-green textured cloth boards, in the publisher's pictorial dust jacket in cream and buff with a delicate leaf-vine border framing the title, in the publisher's clear acetate sleeve. Signed in black ink "Ron Loewinsohn" at the colophon. ISBN 0-87685-147-2. Very good in a very good dust jacket; the olive cloth bright and clean with no shelf wear, the binding tight.
A short collection of twenty-seven pages, dedicated "this one is for the lady in the tree." The Leaves finds Loewinsohn working in the spare, perception-centered manner he had refined since his Beat and San Francisco Renaissance beginnings — short-lined poems attentive to the natural world and to the act of seeing it, the leaf and the tree of the title serving as figures for noticing, change, and the passage of time. Barbara Martin's design frames the title page with a slender leaf-vine border in keeping with the book's name.
Per the colophon, the book was issued in three states: 1,000 copies in paper wrappers; 200 numbered copies signed by the poet, of which this is one; and 26 copies hand-bound in boards by Earle Gray, lettered and signed — the standard three-state Black Sparrow production of the period, of which the signed hardcover is the usual collector's target.
SKU TO-2026-005
