Angel Island, 1961. Near fine/very good.
A wonderful album of Beat photos by Jerry Stoll depicting North Beach life in the late 1950s -- the poets and painters as well as the Italian shopkeepers, the shabby houses and the multi-ethnic children. Everyone seems unselfconscious, unposed, merely caught in the middle of their daily routine. Connell did not provide a text as such, but merely chose appropriate quotations from Bartlett's to illustrate each shot. The photos were taken around the year of my birth, in a neighborhood I would live in for two happy/miserable years, where I would go booking with Allan before all the bookstores were driven out, where Phuong first visited me and we began to fall in love -- how could I not like them?
I bought my first copy of this book from Allan, probably in the late 1980s. I gave Connell this copy, and he annotated a dozen or so of the photos with the names of the people. When he sent it back, he also included a full page letter, most of it about the book -- "Bufano was locally famous as a sculptor and (perhaps not a true story) for mailing his trigger finger to Wilson to protest WWI ... I was told that the mostly invisible girl nearly hidden in darkness killed herself not long after this photo." Connell signed the book too -- there are none signed by him online, although there is one for $350 inscribed by Stoll. Now in Connell's mailing envelope with his return address. Allan's price: $15. Mine: NFS.
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