BURGESS, Gelett; PORTER, Bruce (editors).
The Lark: Book the First. Nos. 1 to 12, May 1895 to April 1896.
FIRST EDITION THUS. San Francisco: William Doxey, 1896.
Octavo. The twelve monthly numbers of The Lark's first year bound by the publisher into a single volume, with collective title and contents leaves at the front. Original tan pictorial cloth with Bruce Porter's Piping Faun cover design in three colors, the spine lettered in brown; printed on both sides of the magazine's characteristic bamboo paper. Very good: the cloth lightly soiled and toned as usual for this construction, the cover design clean and bright, the spine lightly worn at the head with the gilt faded but legible, the binding sound; internally the bamboo paper uniformly toned but supple and intact, without marginalia or inscription.
A landmark of 1890s San Francisco literary culture. The Lark ran for twenty-four monthly numbers and a final Epi-Lark between May 1895 and April 1897, founded by Gelett Burgess and Bruce Porter as the vehicle of the loose circle of young San Francisco writers and artists who became known as Les Jeunes — among them Burgess and Porter, Florence Lundborg, Ernest Peixotto, Willis Polk, Porter Garnett, Yone Noguchi, and Carolyn Wells. Printed on delicate bamboo paper with a deliberately informal aesthetic, it was dedicated, in Burgess's framing, to "sincerity, spontaneity, and gaiety," and reached a national circulation of some three thousand by its second year, widely noticed in the Eastern and Midwestern press.
Bound by itself, Book I represents the first half of the run and arguably the more important half — it contains the Purple Cow, the Stevenson portrait, and the first establishing of the magazine's voice and circle. Complete two-volume sets (Books I and II with the Epi-Lark) are uncommon and command higher prices; Book I alone is the more accessible entry for collectors of California literature, San Francisco printing, and the 1890s little magazines.
SKU TO-2026-001
