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The Studio Ltd., Published 1927. Hardcover, viii + 191 pp.; 22 cm; first edition; top edge gilt; with a color frontispiece (a page from the Zouche Codex, tissue guard present), numerous monochrome plates, and a pictorial map on the lining-papers.
In Good condition, no dust jacket. Red cloth boards, the spine lettered and decorated in gilt with an Aztec design and a blind device to the front board; the spine sunned and darkened, frayed and nicked at the head and tail, with mild to moderate shelf and edge wear, bumping and creasing to the edges and corners, and some soiling and spotting to the covers. The spine a little shaken, with a thin crack to the front hinge and the paper split between the front free endpaper and the front pastedown, though the binding holds. Pages mildly toned, and unmarked apart from the ownership marks noted below. Thomas Athol Joyce's survey of the art of the ancient Maya and Mexican civilizations, published by The Studio in 1927. Joyce, an ethnographer at the British Museum, ranges across architecture, sculpture, pottery, painting, metalwork, and mosaic, illustrated from a color frontispiece and numerous monochrome plates of codices, sculpture, and artifacts. From the library of the archaeologist Richard B. Woodbury (1917-2009), with his ink signature to the front pastedown, his pictorial bookplate to the front free endpaper, and an 'R. and N. Woodbury' ownership stamp (for Richard and his wife, the anthropologist Nathalie F. S. Woodbury) to the corner of the front free endpaper. Woodbury excavated the Maya site of Zaculeu in Guatemala (co-author of The Ruins of Zaculeu, 1954), taught at Columbia and the University of Arizona, and served as Curator of Archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution from 1963 to 1969. A fitting association copy: a foundational survey of Maya and Mexican art from the working library of a leading Mesoamerican archaeologist. Contents: Introduction; Architecture; Sculpture; Pottery; Painting and Draughtsmanship; Metal-work; Clothing and Personal Adornment; Stone-flaking, Mosaic and Leatherwork; with select bibliography.