Description:

Borden, Lizzie (1860-1927) Great Irony! A book of "Good Cheer," signed and owned by the infamous Lizzie Borden!

Her signature, "L. A. B." in pencil, adding "July 19-1901," below, accomplished on the front blank flyleaf of a bound volume of Good Cheer: A Monthly Magazine for Cheerful Thinkers. (Boston: Forbes & Company, November 1900), Vol. 1, 192 pp., 16mo, bound in green paper boards with tan cloth spine titled in black type. With several additional light pencil highlights on several pages within. Some light wear to corners, pages clean.

A most ironic association piece in light of the volume's previous owner-one that's driven home in a poem by Fred Emerson Brooks, entitled the "Whistling Boy," (page 39) which offers the following observation: "You will never find a criminal behind an honest smile."

Several passages are highlighted in the margin in pencil, presumably by Borden herself. One poem, on page 17 entitled, "It is Better," reminds the reader to:

"Keep a smile on your lips; it is better

To joyfully, hopefully try

For the end you would gain then to fetter

Your life with a moan and a sigh.

There are clouds in the firmament ever

The beauty of heaven to mar,

Yet night so profound there is never

But somewhere is shining a star."

Considering the social ostracism Borden endured following her sensational 1893 murder trial, poems like these perhaps offered some measure of comfort. Another passage, on page 45, is also highlighted in pencil:

"'BLUES' are the soggy calms that come

To make our spirits mope,

And steal the breeze of promise from

The shining sails of hope."

Page 49 offers similar solace:

"Though life is made up of mere bubbles,

'T is better than many aver,

For while we've a whole lot of troubles,

The most of them never occur."

In light of her infamy, Borden was an animal lover, and upon her death in 1927 she left $30,000 to the Fall River Animal Rescue League. Another highlighted passage offers a hint as to her attitude toward animals (p. 79): "He knows he should be kind to dumb creatures, but he notes that his father drives horses with docked tails and over-head check-reins, that he shoots deer, that he cases a little fox with a pack of noisy hounds, and that his mother wears a stuffed bird on her Sunday bonnet."

Of course, Lizzie is better known from this most familiar rhyme recited at the time of her 1892 murder trial (and afterwards after she was acquitted): "Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one."

Anything signed by Lizzie Borden is extremely rare. In 2003, a signed copy of a book owned by her sold for $6,000. Only three ALsS signed by her have sold at auction in the last 25 years, the latest bringing over $8,000.

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