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  “Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road”: Out of Africa; inscribed by Karen Blixen

  BLIXEN, Karen. [Isak Dinesen].

  Out of Africa.

  London: Putnam, 1948.

  Later printing of the author’s classic memoir, recounting her seventeen years in Kenya. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by the author on the front free endpaper, "Karen Blixen Je Responderai March 1957." While in Africa, Blixen took as her motto “Je Responderai,” “I will answer,” from the family crest of her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton. She explained: “I liked this old motto so much that I asked Denys, an earlier pioneer in African than myself – although all we settlers who had come out before the war looked upon ourselves as one family, a kind of Mayflower people – if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular. The first of these was its high valuation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue – you may stroke them or you may strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?” Very good in a very good price-clipped dust...

  Price: $11,000.00     Item Number: 144520

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