8vo. Bound in publisher's quarter navy cloth over canary yellow paper boards. Gilt lettering to spine, blindstamping to front cover. 136 pp. Near Fine with light edgewear to boards and light toning throughout, in Near Fine unclipped dust jacket with light soiling, a few small chips and nicks, toning and edgewear. Inscribed on the ffe, "For Belle Livingston with pleasant memories of our meeting in Paris - Sincerely - Langston Hughes / New York, July 27, 1949."

With a remarkable presentation inscription to Isabelle Graham, who changed her name to Belle Livingston when she became a chorus girl and for a time was billed in the 1890's as "the girl with poetic legs".  She knew Teddy Roosevelt, Diamond Jim Brady, Isadora Duncan and Lily Langtry and performed in a Broadway show that traveled to London in the early 1900s, then ran her own “salon” in Paris. For her hourglass curves, a journalist called her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.” A self-described bohemian, Belle claimed to have had many affairs with prominent European men and married four times. When she returned from Paris in the late 1920s, she opened private club-type speakeasies inside mansions in Manhattan. Her speakeasies (including the "58th Street Country Club" with an indoor miniature golf course) drew celebrities as well as gangsters such as Al Capone and Owney Madden. During a raid by law enforcement, she famously tried to escape onto a roof while dressed in red pajamas.