San Francisco: The Porpoise Bookshop, 1955

Tall 8vo, pp. 33. Original tan boards, title label to spine. No dustwrapper, as issued. Woodcuts by Jack Curtis. Boards very lightly marked, but a near fine copy.

First edition. One of 125 copies, SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, AND ADDITIONALLY INSCRIBED: ‘And for Judy Evans, who not only read but fed the poet, yours Jack Curtis’.

Poems and pictures by Jack Curtis. A graduate of Kansas State University School of Journalism, Curtis is better known as the photojournalist whose photographs of the Clutter family, and their murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were used (without either permission or payment) in Truman Capote’s account of the killings, In Cold Blood, published in 1966. When the book was published Curtis destroyed all his photographs and negatives, published and unpublished, relating to the case.

The limitation page states that Cool of a Kansas was the twelfth book to be published by the Peregrine Press, and was printed by Harold Evans. Given the surname and the nature of the inscription, it’s a fair guess that the Judy Evans to whom Curtis inscribed this book was Harold Evans’ wife.