Caresse Crosby

1891 or 1892 (sources differ) | Writer and publisher

A patent and a printing press offer unusually concrete starting points for Caresse Crosby. The first records an effort to change a garment; the second produced books whose physical construction was part of their appeal. Both required decisions about materials, use, and an audience. Her history includes social wealth, but its significance cannot be understood merely by listing the people who entered her company. [1,2]

Under the name Mary P. Jacob, she applied for a brassiere patent in February 1914; it was granted that November. The specification addressed problems of fit, movement, and compatibility with evening gowns cut low at the back. It described a garment without bones and with a construction intended to accommodate different wearers. This is evidence of a particular invention, not proof that she invented the first brassiere. The document itself calls the design an improvement within an existing category of clothing.

In Paris, Caresse and her husband Harry Crosby established a publishing venture in 1927. Initially called Éditions Narcisse, it became the Black Sun Press in 1928. Their own poetry was among its early material, but the press extended to writers whose work would become central to modernist literature. Roger Lescaret supplied the professional printing expertise. Fine bindings, careful typesetting, and illustration made the book a collaborative object rather than a neutral container for a famous name.

The press issued work by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Kay Boyle, alongside editions of earlier writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. Such a list demonstrates editorial range, although it does not establish that every publication changed its author’s fortunes. The enterprise joined financial resources to the labor of printers, illustrators, and writers. The resulting books also ask a question about readership: expensive, limited editions could support experiment while restricting access to the finished object.

Harry’s death in 1929 did not end Caresse’s publishing activity. She continued work afterward and, in the United States during the 1940s, founded Portfolio, an arts and literary journal. Southern Illinois University’s account places the journal amid the dislocations of the Second World War. The later venture enlarges her biography beyond the celebrated Paris years and beyond the marriage through which those years are frequently narrated. [2,3]

Her art collection similarly crossed media and generations. Surviving works include paintings by Romare Bearden and contributions associated with Salvador Dalí, Dorothea Tanning, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski. Business records and correspondence accompany the art in her papers. The archive can therefore help distinguish acquisition, friendship, commissioned illustration, and sustained professional support, activities too often compressed into the word patronage.

Crosby’s route into Natalie’s Constellation is presently strongest through the interconnected publishing world and its writers. A bibliographical lead identifies discussion of Barney in Crosby’s memoir, The Passionate Years, but that passage needs direct reading before particular meetings or intimacies are described. Her independent achievement already belongs within this historical world: she helped determine what could be printed, what form it took, and which artistic relationships left material evidence behind. [2,3,4]