The Sunwise Turn
The Sunwise Turn, A Modern Bookshop was a bookshop in New York City that served as a literary salon and gathering-place for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Peggy Guggenheim (an intern in 1920), Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Harold Loeb, John Dos Passos and others.[1] It was founded by Madge Jenison and Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clarke in 1916, and operated until 1927. As such, it is one of the first bookshops in America to be owned and operated by women.[2] Its papers — those of its founders and of the bookshop itself — are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[3]
The bookshop showed art as well as books; Guggenheim credited the shop with spurring her love of collecting.[4]
Publishing history
[edit]In addition to acting as an exhibition and performance space, the shop published five illustrated poetry broadsides and at least ten books between 1916 - 1923.
The broadsides were the first publishing venture undertaken by the shop, and each paired an artist with a poet. Issued sequentially in 1916, the broadside series featured poems and hand-colored drawings:
- "Ballads for Sale" by Amy Lowell ; drawing by Walt Kuhn
- "The Scientist" by Gladys Cromwell ; drawing by John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke
- "Cow of Curses" by Amy Murray ; drawing by Amy Murray
- "The Bird Seller Praises his Bird of Paradise" by Padraic Colum ; drawing by Herbert Crowley
- "Chariots" by Witter Bynner ; drawing by Howard Coluzzi.[5]
1916 also saw the publication of Lord Dunsany's "A Night at an Inn" in conjunction with the Neighborhood Playhouse as "Neighborhood Playhouse Plays No. 1"[6]
The Sunwise Turn pioneered the publication of Indian contemporary writing in America with two collections by Ananda Coomaraswamy "The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays" and "Prayers and Epigrams."[7][8]
Locations
[edit]The initial location was 2 East 31st Street; in 1919 the shop moved to the Yale Club building at 51 East 44th Street, where it remained until it closed in 1927. Mowbray-Clarke, with the help of Harold and Marjorie Content Loeb, bought Jenison out in 1919/1920. (Jenison would go on to publish an account of the shop's early years, Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling [E.P. Dutton, 1923]). When in 1927 it proved to be insolvent, Mowbray-Clarke sold the firm with its stock to Doubleday, Page & Co. for $5,000 (~$70,595 in 2023).[3]
References
[edit]- ^ Ohta, Yukie. "New York Bound Books · The Sunwise Turn: The Modern Bookshop". Newyorkboundbookstore.com. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
- ^ Ted Bishop, "The Sunwise Turn and the Social Space of the Bookshop" in The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop, ed. Huw Osborne. London: Routledge, 2015
- ^ a b "The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers An Inventory of Records at the Harry Ransom Center". Norman.hrc.utexas.edu. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
- ^ Dearborn, Mary V. (2004). Mistress of modernism: the life of Peggy Guggenheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. pp. 34–35.
- ^ https://hollis.harvard.edu/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=01HVD_ALMA212192717050003941&context=L&vid=HVD2&lang=en_US&search_scope=everything&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=everything&query=any,contains,%22Sunwise%20Turn%22&offset=0
- ^ A night at an inn,a play in one act. Neighborhood playhouse plays,no. 1. New York. 4 September 2021.
- ^ "The dance of Siva; fourteen Indian essays". New York Sunwise Turn. 1918.
- ^ Armfield, Maxwell; Coomaraswamy; Cory, Herbert E. (Herbert Ellsworth); Cromwell, Dorothea Katharine; Cromwell, Gladys; Crowley, Alice; Eccles, David Eccles; Greely, Rose; Horgan, Andrew J. "The Sunwise Turn/Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers An Inventory of Records at the Harry Ransom Center". norman.hrc.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2024-03-11.