Alphabet for Adults.

Beverly Hills, California: Copley Galleries,, 1948. Inscribed by Man Ray First edition, first printing. Only 500 copies printed. Inscribed by Ray on the copyright page, "for Nigel - for a letter, which preserves many pleasant souvenirs of Edinburgh, and the addition of a new friend, Juliet and Man Ray, Paris 1956". Designed while Man Ray was living in Hollywood and published in December 1948, Alphabet for Adults was printed by pioneering California lithographer Lynton R. Kistler and produced for the Copley Galleries, who had hosted the artist's one-man show earlier the same year. Man Ray "illustrated it with reproductions of 39 fanciful cartoon drawings (including the one on the cover) representing the letters of the alphabet. In the introduction to the book, Man Ray writes the following: 'A letter always suggests a word, and a word always suggests a book. There are words that are for every day use and there are words reserved for the more special occasions, for poetry. One may glean from the former those disinherited symbols which by an inadequate association can be divested of their prosaic meaning and finally projected into the domain of greater emotional exclamations. To make a new alphabet of the discarded props of a conversation can lead only to fresh discoveries in language. Concentration is the desired end, as in an anagram whose density is the measure of its destiny'" (Jillian Suarez for the Guggenheim). Quarto. Original beige linen-backed buff boards, spine lettered in black, pictorial design to front cover in black. No dust jacket issued. 40 leaves: title leaf, text leaf, and 38 leaves with black and white illustrations by Man Ray. Corners bumped otherwise in very good condition. Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, vol. 3, 1998, p. 143; Francis M. Naumann, Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray, Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 6-7; Jillian Suarez, "Man Ray's Alphabet Book for Adults", Guggenheim blog post, 27 Aug. 2015, available online.