GOLD IN YOUR EYE. A New Year's Greeting.

First edition. Signed by the author. Hand bound in peach coloured paper covered boards with titles in silver, bronze and black. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, bright and fresh with just a few minor marks to the extremities. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owners' marks.

Issued in a limited edition of 200 copies (from a total edition of 226), this example is numbered 152 and signed by Charles Bukowski in black ink on the colophon. A single Bukowski poem, printed as a New Year's Greeting for the friends of the publisher. Bukowski's long-lasting relationship with Black Sparrow Press began in March 1966, when founder John Martin appeared at his front door asking if he had any poems he could see. At the time, Bukowski was working for the post office and submitting poems to Jon and Louise 'Gypsy Lou' Webb for their magazine The Outsider, where Martin first encountered his work, but had not received consistent royalties for his publications. Martin was in the process of setting up the Press when he sought to meet the poet, whom he considered "the new Walt Whitman", and selected four poems from a mountain of unpublished work that were suitable to release as broadsides. As such, the poems 'True Story', 'On Going Out to Get the Mail', 'To Kiss the Worms Goodnight' and 'The Girls' were included in the first four publications of Black Sparrow Press from April - July 1966, in a limited print run of 30 copies each. In 1969, Bukowski accepted a salary of $100 per month to quit his job and write for the Press full-time, and in so doing, launched decades of collaboration, financial security and success, and initiated a long friendship between the two men. (Krumhansl 98; Barry, Miles: Charles Bukowski, 2005, pp.145-151).