Literature

Softcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina , 1st, 1984, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, cream paper covers with red and black titling, 137 pages. There is underlining and notations to text in red ink to about half the pages.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Sun-fading to dust jacket spine, two small closed tears to front cover. Faint foxing to edges, previous owner's signature on front end paper, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Chatto & Windus, 1st, 1893, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 288 pages + ads in rear. Green cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Some fading and soil to boards with small tear to upper edge of spine. Binding is slightly shaken and there is a previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf. Internally very clean and bright.

Softcover. London, Routledge, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. Horror fiction has provided our culture with some of its most enduring themes. In examining the cultural apparatus surrounding it, Grixti argues that such narratives raise important questions about the relationship between fiction and society. Clean copy.

Softcover. US, Linen Hall Library, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 56 pages. SIGNED BY EDITOR on title page. Light shelf-wear to wrappers, else a clean, tight copy. A very pleasing collection of letters between two fine Irish writers.

Hardcover. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2nd printing, 1939, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 597 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Faded spine. Tight copy.

Hardcover. Paris, J. Hetzel, Reprint, 1867, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 636 pages. Hardcover. French text only. Previous owners name at top left corner of preliminary page dated 1868. Gilt title and decorations on red leather spine with embossed pebbled cloth covers. Satirical black & white illustrations by Jean-Jacques Grandville. Marbled endpapers. All edges gilt. Light rubbing to cover edges and spine. Small area of discoloration on lower section of front cover. Clean, bright pages.

Hardcover. New York, Julian Messner, Inc., 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 320 pages plus section of black & white photographs. Light soiling to endpapers. Dust jacket with creases and closed tears along edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Peacham VT, The Perpetua Press, 1st, 2002, Hardcover in the publisher's cream-colored linen over boards with spine and upper board gilt-stamped black leather labels. No dust jacket, as issued. 88 pages, only 500 copies printed. A collection of interviews done with Shaw from 1924 - 1945. Bright and clean copy.

Softcover. Middlebury VT, Paul S. Eriksson, 1st pbk, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps. 248 pages. Appendix, bibliography and notes. A study of the relationship between John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and his editor, Pascal Covici, based upon their correspondence. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press , 1st, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 292 pages. Light edgewear, rubbing to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Leopard Publishing Ventures, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 60 pages, illustrated. Built in the cottage orne style from a plan by the Regency architect John Nash (1752-1835), Old Came Rectory is the historic home of the poet philologist, William Barnes (1801-1886), Thomas Hardy's mentor. Amid gatherings of poets, writers and historical figures, how many discussions around the fire of this homely home have gone on to shape the world we know today? INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on Dedication page.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan Company, 1st, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 541 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Light fraying on edges of cover boards. Previous owner's name on front end paper. Gilt lettering on spine, light brown covers.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 230 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean copy. An autobiography covering the first eleven years of the famed Nigerian poet and dramatist.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press , 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 142 pages, Preface by Farrell. Green cloth binding with gilt on spine. Some light pencil marks in margins, on rear end papers.

Hardcover. MA, University of Massachusetts Press , 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 268 pages. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Dust jacket with light edgewear and sunning and a small sticker-stain to front cover.

Hardcover. London, John Murray, 1st definitive ed., 1832-33, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None, Pub. orig. as 14 vols. then 3 more were added. Uniform complete 17 volume set in stunning condition: 3/4 black leather with elaborate design on spines with raised bands, marbled boards and end papers, top edge gilt . Black & white engraved frontis in each volume. Previous owner's bookplate (one on each front end paper), The slightest bumping to a few corners.

Hardcover. Edinburgh, John Grant, 1st, 1927, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 3 hardcover volumes: 351 pages, 400 pages, 600 pages. Brown boards with tan cloth spine. Leather spine labels with gilt lettering. Frontispiece in Vols 1 & 2. Previous owner's sticker front paste-down. Foxing on front paste-down. Previous owner's signature and bookplate in each book.

Hardcover. NY, Prentice Hall, 2nd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 258 pages, b&w photographs. The story of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan in the movies.

Hardcover. New York, Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 221 pages. Remainder-mark to bottom edge. Very nice in brodart cover.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 663 pages. Clean copy. Edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel. This is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties and it is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade.

Softcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 137 pages, light blue wrappers. An uncorrected proof. The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in very good dust jacket with mild fading to spine. 184 pages plus index, b&w photographs. Light edge wear, protected by mylar cover. A very clean, tight copy. Written from personal recollection and years of research by the friend and writer Steinbeck knew would one day be his biographer. Emphasizes Steinbeck's formative years: boyhood in Salinas, farmhand, seaman, road-gang flunkie, hod carrier, dam builder and pursuit of wine, women and song.

Hardcover. Garden City, NY, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, 277 pages. Dust jacket with extensive ripping and wear. Covered in mylar for protection. Dark red boards with gilt title to spine. Red staining to top edge. Soiling to ell edges. Overall, a tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated frontispiece etching of Blenheim. Burgundy cloth with gilt titles and decoration, top edge gilt. The memoirs of the author of "Land of Hope and Glory." Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1t, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Color illustrations throughout.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Frog Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Amy Wallace's first meeting with Carlos Castaneda, the infamous anthropologist-turned-shaman, whose books described meetings with Yaqui Indian spiritual teacher Don Juan. Castaneda's rise was meteoric in the late 1960s as he wrote massive bestsellers, inspired many to experiment with psychedelics, and was dubbed "The Godfather of the New Age". The possibility that Castaneda's experiences may have been fabricated did little to compromise his legend. As the daughter of best-selling novelist Irving Wallace, Amy was rarely shy around famous people. When her father insisted she meet Castaneda, she at first demurred. Little did she know that a delightful first meeting would begin a 20-year friendship, followed by her descent into the dramatic and deeply troubled affair chronicled in this book. Wallace reveals the inner workings of the "Cult of Carlos", run by a charismatic authoritarian in his sixties who controlled his young female followers through emotional abuse, mind games, bizarre rituals, dubious teachings, and sexual excess. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, Franklin Library, Ltd. Ed., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, full red leather binding with 3 raised bands on the spine. Gilt stamped boards and page edges. Includes the Franklin Library supplement sheet.

Hardcover. Berkeley , University of California Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 163 pages, b&w photos. Light pencil marking to 10 pages, otherwise clean. A unique look into the subject area, and the contributory factors of people who engage in early esoteric based practice, in remote rural Philippines. The author is concise, and the book is informative and provides quite a balanced view of development with a view particularly to cultural and socio-economic influences.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, 259 pages, photographic frontispiece, 4 leaves of plates; original blue cloth over blue boards, gilt lettering on spine, Autobiography of the English writer and founder of the Hogarth Press with his wife Virginia Woolf. The fourth volume of the autobiography. Remainder line to edge, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Oakville Ontario , Mosaic Press , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 276 pages. B&W illustrations. Here is an affectionate look back at the outsized heroes who once occupied the imagination of millions of loyal readers. The Shadow. Tarzan. Doc Savage. Captain Future. The Spider. Zero. They were the original super guys - godfathers and inpsiration to the likes of Superman, Batman, and James Bond. Fascinating and informative, The Great Pulp Heroes is a lively and entertaining history of those fabulous characters, of them gaudy, glorious magazines that spawned them, and of the amazing wordsmiths who churned out their monthly adventures. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Paris, Tchou, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 253 pages, b&w cartoon drawings by Copi. White cloth covers with black design. A collection of quotes from writers of the Surrealist movement in France. Long preface by Corvin. INSCRIBED BY BOTH AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR (HIS WITH A SKETCH OF A BIRD) to Roger Shattuck, author and chronicler of the period. Publishers complimentary card laid in. Small tan stain to cloth at top of front cover, otherwise very good.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Carey, Lea & Carey, Second series, 1829, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Vol 1: 296 pages. Vol 2: 286 pagesHardcovers. Brown boards, paste down title on spine in black. Original owner inscription on front flyleaf of both books, original owner's signature on back pages. Pages untrimmed, rough edged, tanning and foxing to pages. Binding very good, spine straight. Agewear throughout, in very good condition for its age. Good solid volumes of Sir Walter Scott's tales as told to his grandson.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a violet dust jacket with light fading to spine, 232 pages. A collection of essays exploring all aspects on a controversial English poet, the 17th century libertine, The Earl of Rochester. Different sections focus on sexual politics, on the poetry of intellect, and on Rochester and his contemporaries. Name, date and light pencil notations on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Frederick A. Stokes, 1st thus, 1890, Hardcover, 3/4 decorated white cloth with gilt stamped decorative pattern. Vignette edition with engraved frontispiece and 100 illustrations by Thos. McIlvaine. An Oriental romance, originally published in 1817, consisting of four narrative poems connected by a prose section. Small blank label on inside front cover, otherwise a tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with faded gilt lettering on spine. 191 pages, b&w frontis. of Hawker. Small name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 530 pages. A captivating exploration of A. E. Housman and the influence of his particular brand of Englishness. A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad made little impression when it was first published in 1896 but has since become one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the English language. Its evocation of the English countryside, thwarted love, and a yearning for things lost is as potent today as it was more than a century ago, and the book has never been out of print. In Housman Country, Peter Parker explores the lives of A. E. Housman and his most famous book, and in doing so shows how A Shropshire Lad has permeated English life and culture since its publication. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a rubbed and edgeworn dust jacket. 433 pages, b&w illustrations. McClure was the father of the muckraking movement and brought about a revolution in American journalism in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. His journalistic contributors included Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and he introduced authors such as O. Henry, Booth Tarkington, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane and Jack London to the American public. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Novelist and critic Colm Toibin provides "a fascinating exploration of writers and their families" (Entertainment Weekly) and "an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires" (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of essays that explore the relationships of writers to their families and their work. Colm Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Co., 1st pbk., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta--traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Softcover. NY, The Feminist Press, 1ST, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages, b&w illustrations. The memoir of a young Catholic women's affair with a pastor in Italy. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. A few pages with light pencil underlining., otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages, b&w illustrations. When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immortality--for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature. INSCRIBED BY LOVING ("Jerry") on the half-title page. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, The Paris Review, 1st, 1963, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 180 pages. Interview with Katherine Anne Porter. Also, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Creeley, and more. Mild outer soil and some general wear.

Hardcover. New York, Viking, 1st thus, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 135 pages. Previous owners name at top right edge of front endpaper. Minor foxing to preliminary pages. Maroon cloth covers with narrow section of fade at top edge of front cover. Dust jacket with edgewear, light chipping and tiny holes along folds - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 352 pages. Translated by Sam Taylor. As a bilingual bestselling novelist with a mixed Franco-British bloodline and a host of eminent forebears, Tatiana de Rosnay is the perfect candidate to write a biography of Daphne du Maurier. As an eleven-year-old de Rosnay read and reread Rebecca, becoming a lifelong devotee of Du Maurier's fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following Du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious sixteen-year-old, a twenty-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady. With a rhythm and intimacy to its prose characteristic of all de Rosnay's works, Manderley Forever is a vividly compelling portrait and celebration of an intriguing, hugely popular and (at the time) critically underrated writer.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1st, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 310 pages, 250 b&w illustrations. The life of one of America's major literary artists, Henry David Thoreau: , born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts: a schoolmaster, tutor, surveyor, mason, gardener, farmer, house painter, carpenter, day-laborer, abolitionist, pencil-maker. lecturer, naturtalist, writer. Small name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, second printing, 316 pages plus index, sewn paperback cover price $2.45, very good lightly used copy.