William Carlos Williams. An Early Martyr.

New York: The Alcestis Press, 1935. 

8vo.; cream wrappers. In glassine jacket; small chips to spine and tail and top corners. In heavily stained original slip case. In custom brown clamshell case stamped in gilt.

First edition of 165 copies, 20 copies number I–XX on Duca di Modena paper, 135 copies on Strathmore Permanent All-Rag Paper, this is copy #111. Signed at publication on the colophon by William Carlos Williams.

An Early Martyr is a collection of thirty poems that includes “The Yachts,” “Proletarian Portrait,” “To a Poor Old Woman,” “Flowers By the Sea,” “To a Mexican Pig-Bank,” “Solstice,” “An Elegy for D.H. Lawrence,” “The Catholic Bells,” “The Dead Baby,” “The Immemorial Wind,” “To Be Hungry is to Be Great,” and “You Have Pissed Your Life,” among others. Although this volume was not published with a social or political agenda, many of the poems in this collection are socio-politically focused and reflect Williams’s opinions on American democracy and society in his earlier years as a poet.

Williams reflected on the collection in The Autobiography [New York: Norton, 1951]: “[Ronald Lane] Latimer published for me An Early Martyr, superbly, lavishly printed on rag paper, dedicated to John Coffee, who had been arrested and sent to Matteawan Hospital for the criminally insane. The poem ‘An early martyr’ tells about it, the factual details. The title poem is, in effect, a dedication.” Williams’s biographer Paul Mariani discusses the uncharacteristic choice to go with such an expensive production: “Williams knew the incongruity of having his American poems published in such a form as he had lectured and written on the importance of getting poems out to as many people as cheaply as possible-but he also knew that there was really no choice. People like Latimer weren't knocking down his door with offers to publish him every day. It would have to be a limited edition, then, or none” [William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981].