Sarah Stone (center) at Kelly Writers House, April 2013.
In 1916, seven years after her first book publication, forty-two-year-old Gertrude Stein fantasized about ways to see more of her work into print. She exclaimed in a letter to Carl Van Vechten, “where oh where is the man to publish me in series. […] He can do me as cheaply and as simply as he likes but I would so like to be done.” Fantasies of “being done” aside, it is in fact Stein’s persistent self-assertion that secured what limited publishing opportunities she had before the popular success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
The first book Stein saw into print, Three Lives, appeared at her own expense through the vanity publisher Grafton Press in 1909. From then until Brewsie and Willie, the last titlereleased before Stein’s death in 1946, she created, alongside a remarkable body of literature, a record of how she saw her writing into public circulation. Her three-year career as copublisher of the Plain Edition (with her partner Alice B. Toklas) occasioned drafts and correspondence that show Stein engaging with the book as a material object. While her writing is now recognized as among the most innovative in the twentieth century, Stein’s paraliterary work in book design and publishing has gone largely unexamined.
