This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 10/28/2023
MISS ALICE BOUNDS, THE BEAR LADY [cover title]. Leicester: Willsons’, ca. 1911. Souvenir pitch book (7¼ × 4¾") on tan pulp paper (neatly rebacked, a few mended tears with archival tape). [8]pp. incl. covers. Bounds, a Black woman born in 1877 whose mother was also “marked in this way,” writes that she is called the “Bear Lady” because she has “no ulna or radian bones or lower portion of the arm…I cannot stretch my fingers like an ordinary person. They look exactly like the forepaw of the bear.” In addition, Bounds cites the “principal Professors and most distinguished doctors” in Paris and Berlin who have attested to the genuineness of her “very rare malformation.”