This Quarter : April-June 1932 Issue, Vol. III, No. 2

Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1932. 8vo, pp. 559-751, 8pp. advertisments bound in at rear. Printed stiff paper wrappers. Lacking the scarce original glassine sleeve. Oversized wrappers rubbed and worn with loss to foot of spine and front wrapper, spine worn and chipped at head. First edition of the Spring 1932 issue of the (mostly) Parisian modernist magazine, This Quarter. WITH A STORY BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV, HERE WRITING AS VLADIMIR SIRIN. This Quarter was founded in 1925 by the American expatriate poet Ernest Walsh [1895-1926] and the English suffragette Ethel Moorhead [1869-1955]. Only two issues of the quarterly had been published when Walsh died of consumption at the age of thirty-one, and after a period of turbulence and only sporadic publication, This Quarter was taken over by Edward Titus of the Black Manikin Press, a highbrow expatriate imprint based in Paris. Under Titus's stewardship the magazine was more professionally run but less adventurously edited. It ceased production in 1932 after a run of just eighteen issues, having published work by most of the leading Paris expatriates of the day, as well as many little-known writers -- Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams among them -- who were about to become very well-known indeed. Contributors to this issue include Vladimir Nabokov -- here writing as Vladimir Sirin, who contributes the story The Return of Tchorb -- Paul Valéry, Louis MacNiece and Humbert Wolfe.