CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/10/2017

The rarest William Eggleston: Election Eve

Election Eve, William Eggleston’s first artist’s book, was published as an edition of only five in October of 1977. It contained one hundred original prints in two leather-bound volumes housed in a linen box. To this day, it remains Eggleston’s rarest collectible book. Luckily for us, Steidl has remedied the situation with this new trade edition, released this week and set to sell out by the next. On a printed insert included with the book, original publisher Caldecot Chubb tells the story of how the first edition came about. He concludes, “My mother, when we knelt on the living room rug at home and I showed her the two enormous volumes and the pictures in them, thought I’d done something wonderful. I was 27 when I published Election Eve and had no real idea how lucky I was. I know now.”