Hardcover. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 521 pages, b&w illustrations. Remarkable photographs and fifty essays by renowned contemporary writers--such as Margaret Drabble, P. D. James, and Michael Holroyd--celebrate the British and Irish literary legends of the last four hundred years and takes us through the homes of famous writers- Robert Burns, James Joyce, Kipling, Keats, Dickens, Potter, Virginia Wolff and many more. Clean copy. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 304 pages. In 1976, the critic Paul Nelson spent several weeks interviewing his literary hero, legendary detective writer Ross Macdonald. Beginning in the late 1940s with his shadowy creation, ruminating private eye Lew Archer, Macdonald had followed in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but ultimately elevated the form to a new level. "We talked about everything imaginable," Nelson wrote-including Macdonald's often meager beginnings; his dual citizenship; writers, painters, music, books, and movies he admired; how he used symbolism to change detective writing; his own novels and why Archer was not the most important character-"my God, everything." It's All One Case provides an open door to Macdonald at his most unguarded. The book is far more than a collection of never-before-published interviews, though. Published in a handsome, oversized format, it is a visual history of Macdonald's professional career, illustrated with rare and select items from one of the world's largest private archives of Macdonald collectibles. Featuring in full color the covers of the various editions of Macdonald's more than two dozen books, facsimile reproductions of pages from his manuscripts, magazine spreads, and many never before seen photos of Macdonald and his friends (such as Kurt Vonnegut), including those by celebrated photojournalist Jill Krementz. It's All One Case is an intellectual delight and a visual feast, a fitting tribute to Macdonald's distinguished career. Full-color illustrations throughout
Hardcover. London, Chatto and Windus, 1st, 1960, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 260 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front flyleaf. Hardcover. Gilt title on spine. Covers bound in purple cloth. Boards have a touch of age wear at edges. Gutter split at title page, otherwise, binding tight. Clean inside. Edges and preliminary pages have some age-yellow and foxing. Still in great shape for its age.
Lebanon NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 294 pages, b&w illustrations. Presents a succinct, articulate examination of the work of the pioneering but controversial archaeologist Roland Wells Robbins (1908-1987) and the development of historical archaelogy in America. In 1945, the self-taught Robbins discovered the remains of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. He excavated the site, documented his findings, and in 1947 published a short book, Discovery at Walden, about the experience. This project launched Robbins's career in archaeology, restoration, and reconstruction, and he went on to excavate at a number of New England iron works and other sites, including the Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills in New York, Stawbery Banke in New Hampshire, and Shadwell, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia birthplace. Although lacking academic training, Robbins quickly developed remarkably sophisticated techniques for the period. However, his "pick and shovel" methods were considered suspect and increasingly frowned upon by the emerging American historical archaeological establishment. Clean copy.
Softcover. Paris, Jose Corti, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 215 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half title page. French text. Wraparound red band with light wrinkle, wear. Otherwise very good.
Hardcover. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 2nd printing, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 259 pages. Biography by Issac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer. Slight yellowing to pictorial dust jacket, else a lovely copy in clear mylar cover.
Hardcover. Princton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Fairy tales, often said to be ''timeless'' and fundamentally ''oral,'' have a long written history. However, argues Elizabeth Wanning Harries in this provocative book, a vital part of this history has fallen by the wayside. The short, subtly didactic fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Grimms have determined our notions about what fairy tales should be like. Harries argues that alongside these ''compact'' tales there exists another, ''complex'' tradition: tales written in France by the conteuses (storytelling women) in the 1690s and the late-twentieth-century tales by women writers that derive in part from this centuries-old tradition. Grounded firmly in social history and set in lucid prose, Twice upon a Time refocuses the lens through which we look at fairy tales.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 314 pages. Contrasting the Victorian system of virtues - respectability, self-help, discipline, cleanliness, obedience, orderliness - with the opportunistic, superficial morality of modern society, an intellectual historian calls for a deeper commitment to moral responsibility. According to Himmelfarb, Victorian "manners and morals" created a society that emphasized a strong family life for all classes and gave rise to a prosperous economy and the early feminist and social service movements. Furthermore, the influence of these virtues caused the incidence of illegitimate births and violent crimes to drop significantly and remain low until the 1960s. Clean copy.
Softcover. Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. 107 pages, b&w engravings by Steven Sorman. Light edge wear to wrappers. Else a very clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 2nd pr., 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Whitman's genius, passions, poetry, and androgynous sensibility entwined to create an exuberant life amid the turbulent American mid-nineteenth century. In vivid detail, Kaplan examines the mysterious selves of the enigmatic man who celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1965, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. A collection of Updike's nonfiction prose written the previous decade, with topics including Ted Williams, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark, Max Beerbohm, among others. Yellow cloth covers with spotting, concealed by the dj. Otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 150 pages. Light edgewear and sunning to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Biography of the American Southern novelist which includes study of her later novels, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists.
Hardcover. London, Picador, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, SIGNED BY NAIPAUL. Like new condition in a bright dust jacket. The author's fourteenth and final novel.
Softcover. UK, Oxford University Press, Revised Ed., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 492 pages. An Essay on Philosophical Method contains the most sustained discussion in the twentieth century of the subject matter and method of philosophy and an unparalleled explanation of why philosophy has a distinctive domain of enquiry that differs from that of the sciences of nature. This new edition of the Essay focuses on Collingwood's contribution to metaphilosophy and locates his argument for the autonomy of philosophy against the twentieth century trend to naturalize its subject matter. Collingwood argues that the distinctions which philosophers make, for example, between the concepts of duty and utility in moral philosophy, or between the concepts of mind and body in the philosophy of mind, are not empirical taxonomies that cut nature at the joints but semantic distinctions to which there may correspond no empirical classes. This identification of philosophical distinctions with semantic distinctions provides the basis for an argument against the naturalization of the subject matter of philosophy for it entails that not all concepts are empirical concepts and not all classifications are empirical classifications. Collingwood's explanation of why philosophy has a distinctive subject matter thus constitutes a clear challenge to the project of radical empiricism. While not losing sight of its historical context, the introduction to this new edition seeks to locate Collingwood's account of philosophical method against the background of contemporary concerns about the fate of philosophy in the age of science. This volume also contains a substantial amount of previously unpublished material: "The Metaphysics of F. H. Bradley," "Method and Metaphysics," and Collingwood's fascinating correspondence with Gilbert Ryle. The latter will prove to be a mine of information for anyone interested in the origins of analytic philosophy.
Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, original blue cloth-backed boards. Quarto. 17 pages & 8 plates. From a limited printing of 385 copies under the direction of Bruce Rogers. Also laid in :2 color photos and one b&w photo of the medallion. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, W. H. Allen & Co., 1st, 1883, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to spine and gilt titles and gilt rules to front board. Prefatory note by Bertha Thomas plus 247 pages plus four-page publisher's advertisements for titles in the Eminent Women Series to the rear. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st thus, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Four-volume paperback box set represents Beckett's major works in prose, drama, poetry, and criticism edited by Paul Auster. The cardboard slipcase is Fine. 2047 pages. 6 1/2 x 8 1/2 " tall. Includes "Waiting for Godot," "Endgame," and "Happy Days." Samuel Beckett was one of the most important and influential figures of twentieth-century literature. His radically minimalist language, black humor, and surreal situations unleashed a brilliant vision uniquely Beckett's own and, in the process, forever changed literature. Still in publisher's shrink wrap. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket with light tanning to spine. A study and interpretation of Yeats' five plays and related lyrics. Includes notes, bibliography & index.
Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Illustrated in color by the Reys. A reprint of a title first published in 1944. The story of Pretzel, the longest dachshund in the world. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Macmillan Company, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, black cloth spine over paper boards with a striped design, 85 pages. Translated from the French and edited by Jean Autret and William Burford. Glassine dust jacket present but fair with chunk gone from rear, slipcase with minor wear. Small red dot to top edge.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Foreword by Joseph Frank. Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. The general direction is tow Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 194 pages. Index, map, biliographies, appendices. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Jill Norman and Hobhouse, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with a mild crease to the front panel. 144 pages. Selections from the several volumes of family albums in the archive at Charleston; portraits cover most of the Bloomsbury circle's members, relations and/or adherents over a 50-year period. Introduction by Quentin Bell. Top edge scrape to front board. Bookplate on inside front cover, small ownership stamp to front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 12 page introduction by Peter Sabor plus a 56 page facsimile reprint of Sarah Fielding's (Henry"s sister) criticism of Samuel Richardson's novel. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking Press., 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The classic, unforgettable memoir of a young girl's coming of age, Bronx Primitive recalls the vitality of an immigrant neighborhood through the unsentimental eyes of a child. With an unerring eye for detail and an iridescent, clear-eyed prose, Kate Simon captures the particular world of her childhood as well as the universal uncertainties and triumphs of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood.
Hardcover. NY/London, G. P. Putnum's Sons, 1st illust. thus, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt stamping, 242 pages. 24 woodcuts and some decorations by Tunnicliffe. First Illustrated Edition which has been enlarged by the author and contains several new essays. No dust jacket.
Hardcover. London, B. T. Batsford, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. 264 pages, b&w illustrations. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration.Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 201 pages. Stated first edition, 1972, but actually a book club edition with the telltale little indentation at the bottom right of the rear cover, no price on dj flap. Warren served as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969 and is generally considered to be one of the most influential Supreme Court justices and political leaders in the history of the United States. This is a great book on the foundations of our republic and on how to preserve it. Chief Justice Warren explains history and Constitutional law in common terms that are easy to digest. This book stresses the importance of civic engagement, the Bill of Rights, and the need for ethics and respect in a republic. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st US, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 79 pages. Talks originally delivered on the BBC Third Programme, on what goes on in the body when men and animals are thinking. A Series of Broadcast Talks by Sir Charles Sherrington, E.D. Adrian, W.E. Le Gros Clark, S. Zuckerman, E.T.O. Slater, Wilder Penfield, W. Russell Brain, Viscount Samuel, A.J. Ayer & Gilbert Ryle. Dust jacket shows wear at edges and darkening to paper. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Dublin, The Cuala Press, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, one of 425 copies, publisher's device vignette by T. Sturge Moore on title page, minor offsetting to endpapers, else unmarked internally, publisher's cloth-backed blue boards, paper label on spine is chipped, black lettering to upper cover, blue endpapers, spine and extremities slightly toned, else very good. One of 425 copies, printed at the Cuala Press, with the date misprinted as 'MCMXXVIV' on the title page (as noted by Wade). The Cuala Press originally started out as the Dun Emer Press in 1903, founded by Evelyn Gleeson. Influenced by the Gaelic revival occurring in Ireland, it promoted Ireland's cultural heritage, while at the same time training women to work in a useful trade. Eventually the two sisters of W.B. Yeats took over the press, continuing Gleeson's work, and renaming it The Cuala Press in 1908. No dust wrapper, as issued. There is some tanning/foxing to last 8 pages including colophon.
Softcover. South Royalton VT, Steerforth Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 187 pages plus b&w photos. With haunting photographs and piercing descriptions, Women of the Shadows depicts the secluded women of southern Italy and their passionate, painful, heartrending existence. Cornelisen, who lived among these women in the mountainous villages of Lucania after World War II, reveals their struggles during a time when most of their men had to leave for factories in the industrial north. The women remained behind to work the fields. There's Peppina, Ninetta, Teresa, Maria, Pinuccia, and Cettina, all women who "have done things of which they are not proud; they know it in their hearts, as one woman said, that nothing is private, they would also agree with her conclusion: That doesn't mean you get used to it." With an extraordinary understanding of the interior lives of these and other women, Cornelisen brings them out of the shadows to tell their heroic stories in a book which truly merits the label "classic." A new introduction by the author suggests that the more things change, the more, in essence, they remain the same. Wrappers sunned, otherwise tight and clean.
Hardcover. London, S. Highley, Fleet-Street, 1st, 1792, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, half-leather over marbled boards, 556 pages. A collection of essays, letters, dedications, poems and other pieces purported to be the work of Johnson in the editor's Preface. The anonymous compiler makes the case that the pieces should have been included in the Dr. Johnson's Works lately published. Their authenticity may be questionable in some cases. A penciled note inside the front cover suggests this is Vol. 14 of his works with a new title page and "without Stockdale adds(?)..." Curious edition not found elsewhere. Front cover and first page detached, a solid binding, two bookplates, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, National Book Award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman. Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty--a poet, a New Yorker, and an American--keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work. What is it then between us? Whitman asks. In search of an answer, Doty explores spaces--both external and internal--where he finds the poet's ghost. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet's enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. In riveting close readings threaded with personal memoir and illuminated by awe, Doty reveals the power of Whitman's persistent presence in his life and in the American imagination at large. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY/Boston, Japan Society/Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1934, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with white design of broom on front cover, white lettering on spine, 124 pages. Clean copy of a scarce title.
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. New York, Leavitt & Allen, 1st, 1853, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 557 pages. Hardcover with blind stamped decoration on front and rear covers. Light rubbing and wear to edges. Internal pages clean and bright with light tanning.
Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.
Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 1997, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Some soiling to top page block, otherwise clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Adhesive residue on rear dust jacket.
Hardcover. Night Shade Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 439 pages. Hardcover with facsimile copy of handwritten letters to endpapers. Black cloth covered boards with iridescent titles to cover & spine. Frontispiece illustration of H. P. Lovecraft & Donald Wandrei in black & white. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear to edges. Tight binding, sharp corners, clean & unmarked pages.