New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. First edition. Enthusiastically inscribed by Salvador Dalí to Jack Warner, CEO of Warner Bros. Studios, and his wife Ann: "Pur Prince des Gouds Felones Jack ei Anunshka p'amour de [illegible] tout. Dalí, Gala [illegible]" with a drawing of two figures dancing in a desert, plus three scurrying ants and a moon playing a trumpet overhead. A Very Good copy. Illustrated throughout with surrealist photos of Salvador Dalí. Publisher's gray-and-black pictorial boards. Chipping to head of spine, with top centimeter or so of spine beginning to separate (but holding). Some toning to endpapers and some separation at gutter before title-page.

In Dalí's Mustache, the famous artist and his equally famous mustache answer interview questions ("Your mustache looks so rigid – how does it react to the winds of public opinon?") with playful responses ("She bends") and surrealist photographic portraits. Dalí's creative partner for the project was Philippe Halsman, the photographer responsible for the iconic surrealist photograph Dalí Atomicus (1948) as well as a famous 1947 portrait of Albert Einstein later featured on the cover of Time. A collaboration between two iconic eccentrics, Dalí's Mustache is a classic and charming compilation of surrealist portraiture.

Jack Warner (1892 – 1978) was the co-founder and CEO of Warner Bros. Studios. Jack and his brothers Sam, Albert, and Harry, who had already been in the film production business for nearly two decades, founded the studio in Culver City, California in the early 1920s. The early successes of the studio included The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length "talkie," which represented a major technological advancement; and the films of stars including James Cagney, Bette Davis, and Errol Flynn. Over the course of his five-decade career, Jack saw the production of classic Warner Bros. films including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1943), iconic Westerns like The Searchers (1956), and the Audrey Hepburn hit My Fair Lady (1964).

By the time Salvador Dalí inscribed this copy for Jack Warner in 1954, the pair had already known each other for over a decade; in fact, their acquaintance led to a fateful meeting between Dalí and Walt Disney in 1945. At a dinner party hosted by Warner that year, Dalí and Disney began a collaboration that would, eventually, result in the production of Destino, a six-and-a-half-minute surrealist animated film released in 2003. Warner's dinner party has since become the stuff of Disney legend: "At Warner’s party, Dalí and Disney immediately connected, and an overjoyed Dalí accepted Disney’s proposal to collaborate on a surrealist animated short. Over the next eight months, they created more than 200 storyboard sketches set to a love ballad composed by Fantasia composer Armando Dominguez. Their paired ambition...resulted in the story of a haunting romance between two star-crossed lovers: Dahlia, a mortal woman struggling to find love, and Chronos, an all-powerful titan and the personification of time itself" (Saturday Evening Post). Production difficulties during wartime resulted in the project going dormant for decades, but it was eventually resurrected in the early 2000s, long after the deaths of both Disney and Dalí. More than just a film, however, "the Destino collaboration led to a lifelong friendship between the man behind the mouse and the painter of melted clocks." Very Good (Item #8091)