Out of Africa.

DINESEN, Isak [Karen Blixen].

Item Number: 2769

New York: Random House, 1938.

First American edition. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed on the dedication page by the author “Isak Dinesen/ Karen Blixen/ Je Responderai/ February 1958.” Barbara Howes and William Jay Smith (bookplate to pastedown, additionally signed by Howes on front flyleaf). Also laid in is a note signed “Karen Blixen” to Mrs. Barbara (Howes) Smith, on the verso of a portrait card, thanking her gift of a book by Dorothy Canfield (who wrote the introduction to Out of Africa). The poet Barbara Howes visited Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen at her home, Rungstedlund, in Denmark in 1958. The next year, her husband, the poet William Jay Smith, introduced Dinesen at the Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y in New York, where she gave three readings to packed houses. William Jay Smith later wrote the introduction for the 1983 book “The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen.” Howes read this book, with the cloth showing considerable wear, still a good copy in a very good dust jacket with some chips to the spine. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Inscribed first editions are rare.

From 1914 to 1931, Danish aristocrat Baroness Karen Blixen owned and operated a coffee plantation in Kenya. After the plantation failed, she returned to Europe and began to write under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa reads like a collection of stories in which she adheres to no strict chronology, gives no explanation of the facts of her life, and apologizes for nothing. Basis for the film bearing the same name, directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, which went on to win seven Academy Awards.