Death in The Making.

CAPA (Robert) & TARO (Gerda),ALLEN (Jay) (Preface & translation),

Published by New York,, 1938

About this Item

Profusely illustrated with 148 monochrome photos. First edition. 4to., unpaginated; endpaper, 47ll., endpaper, profusely illustrated with 148 b&w photographs, in the original drab olive cloth, titles in reverse on black labels, dustjacket illustrated photographically, initialled ?NC? in pen on front free endpaper, ink stamp on verso of last leaf.
New York, Covici Friede, 1938. 
Endpapers endemically browned, backstrip of cloth foxed or perhaps browned from glue seepage, jacket browned, slight restoration on lower portion and recently a front hinge split has been neatly reinforced, the dust jacket also conserved by laying on to backing paper which is colour matched to small areas of loss on the head and foot of spine, the edges and the photograph on the rear panel (not affecting image).
The truly iconic dustjacket, in any condition, is very rare and this is far better than it sounds. p-139 Parr & Badger Volume I, p-252 - Guerra Grafica: Espagne, 1936-1939: photographes, artistes et écrivains en guerre and probably this copy.
Provenance: the stamp denoting the book as from the library of Michael Lefebvre - author of Guerra Grafica.
This truly great photobook, documenting the Spanish Civil War, is a memorial to Capa?s lover Gerda Taro who was killed by a tank in 1937. The printed dedication, accompanied by a photomontage portrait of Taro, reads:
 ? For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front, and who stayed on. RC?.
Capa and Taro ?captured? ?people? in wartime and how they?re affected by the conflict and not just the mechanics of war (Parr and Badger op. cit.). Lefebvre, whose copy this was, agrees, writing in Guerra Grafica of how, out of all the books on the conflict that this one, produced as a catalogue for an exhibition at the New School, is the most emotional of them all and of how Falling Soldier, the jacket photo of a militiaman, who has gone ?over the top? in the split second in which he was shot and died is ?particularmente eficaz? (op cit), and some consider it to be the ?.single most famous Spanish Civil War photograph? (p-313 Carey Nelson -The Aura of The Cause: Photographs from the Spanish Civil War in The Antioch Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, 1997, The soldier is:
 "Hurled backward by the force of the bullet that has just struck his head, his body has not yet given up the gestural memory of his forward motion. Caught in mid-air, his hand still half clinging to his rifle, his leather cartridge boxes still ready at his waist, he seems at once to stride forward and collapse in death. He is eerily in between, at an impossible place of transition between life and death. The camera has somehow caught a moment that would ordinarily pass too quickly for human perception (op. cit.).
The image first appeared in the French magazine VU two years before this book was published, and was then reprinted by Life, with a circulation of 1,600,000, on July 12, 1937. As one of the most superfamous battelfield images it is perhaps inevitable that it has ?.intermittently been a source of controversy, a victim of rumors spread that it is a hoax, a staged event? (p-314 ibid). However, International Brigaders recalled a fearless photographer, always in the thick of the conflict with many of his photographs published during the war by the Republic uncredited, because he had a collective sense of authorship and eschewed personal fame.

Seller Inventory # XN-CP-RBR-TR

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Death in The Making.
• Publisher: New York,
• Publication Date: 1938
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: CAPA
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good