The Sunwise Turn

The Sunwise Turn, A Modern Bookshop was a bookshop in New York City that served as a literary salon and gathering-place for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Peggy Guggenheim (an intern in 1920), Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Harold Loeb, John Dos Passos and others. It was founded by Madge Jenison and Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clarke in 1916, and operated until 1927. As such, it is one of the first bookshops in America to be owned and operated by women. Its papers — those of its founders and of the bookshop itself — are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The bookshop showed art as well as books; Guggenheim credited the shop with spurring her love of collecting.

Publishing history
In addition to acting as an exhibition and performance space, the shop published five illustrated poetry broadsides and at least ten books between 1916 - 1923.

The broadsides were the first publishing venture undertaken by the shop, and each paired an artist with a poet. Issued sequentially in 1916, the broadside series featured poems and hand-colored drawings:


 * 1) "Ballads for Sale" by Amy Lowell ; drawing by Walt Kuhn
 * 2) "The Scientist" by Gladys Cromwell ; drawing by John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke
 * 3) "Cow of Curses" by Amy Murray ; drawing by Amy Murray
 * 4) "The Bird Seller Praises his Bird of Paradise" by Padraic Colum ; drawing by Herbert Crowley
 * 5) "Chariots" by Witter Bynner ; drawing by Howard Coluzzi.

1916 also saw the publication of Lord Dunsany's "A Night at an Inn" in conjunction with the Neighborhood Playhouse as "Neighborhood Playhouse Plays No. 1"

The Sunwise Turn pioneered the publication of Indian contemporary writing in America with two collections by Ananda Coomaraswamy "The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays" and "Prayers and Epigrams."

Locations
The initial location was 2 East 31st Street; in 1919 the shop moved to the Yale Club building at 51 East 44th Street, where it remained until it closed in 1927. Mowbray-Clarke, with the help of Harold and Marjorie Content Loeb, bought Jenison out in 1919/1920. (Jenison would go on to publish an account of the shop's early years, Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling [E.P. Dutton, 1923]). When in 1927 it proved to be insolvent, Mowbray-Clarke sold the firm with its stock to Doubleday, Page & Co. for $5,000 (~$ in ).