They Seek a City - Gordon Heath's copy
Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1945. First Edition. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. 8vo. Pp. xvii, [2], 266. Index. Bound in dark blue-green cloth with gilt lettering stamped on spine. Slight soiling to cloth. In the scarce pictorial dust jacket, slight chips, esp. at head and tail of spine. Spine also has a vertical crease (see photo). Signed three times by Gordon Heath, twice on the front pastedown and once on the rear pastedown. Very Good / Very Good-. Item #3485
Heath appears to be practicing his signature: On the front pastedown as "S. Gordon heath" and "Gordon heath" and on the rear pastedown as "Gordon heath," dated July, 1945. New York-born Seifield Gordon Heath (he dropped his first name) first came to prominence in Elia Kazan's "Deep are the Roots," which explores US race relations when a black GI returns from WWII to find his fight for world democracy means little in the Jim Crow South. Heath and his life-partner Leroy Payton, from Seattle, moved to Paris where they operated the Café de L'Abbaye, a cabaret-nightclub, while Heath continued to act on both sides of the Atlantic. Heath's narration of the 1954 British animated adaptation of "Animal Farm" remains a notable role.
"They Seek a City" is a landmark text documenting Black flight from the South to points north and west. Historical figures include George Washington Bush, an early settler south of Olympia, Washington Territory, William Gross, the pioneer Seattle restaurateur and hotelier, and Spokane publisher Horace Roscoe Cayton. Uncommon, especially in the dust jacket, which is now protected in a clear, removable, archival sleeve.
Price: $200.00