Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a chipped, tape repaired dust jacket. Maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 266 pages. INSCRIBED BY SIPE on the front fly leaf to fellow professor Roger Mitchell. English majors are used to being told that Shakespeare frequently broke the rules of iambic pentameter, and that as he matured artistically, his usage became bolder and freer. Well, it isn't true. Shakespeare's iambics turn out to be extremely orthodox (which just makes all the more impressive the variations he was able to create within the rules). In 1968 Dorothy Sipe went to the remarkable labor of demonstrating this objectively through a painstaking analysis of over 13,000 lines of verse. She also supplied information I've never found anywhere else on the prosodic rules taught by poets to poets in Shakespeare's day. All this said, including a five star rating for the perfect achievement of its goal, the book is definitely not for everyone interested in Shakespeare's verse and methods. It is devoted to proving a highly specific case by means of many, many examples that non-specialists are likely to find tedious. But if you are deeply interested in some subjects -- Shakespeare's iambics, his coinages, and the history of English iambic technique -- it is well worth your time. Dust jacket tanned, otherwise a clean, tight copy.
Softcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 105 pages. Translated by Helen Weaver. Writings by Artaud about his experience with the Tarahumara Indians in 1936, their rituals and ceremonies, and his efforts to find alternatives to what he felt was an increasingly limited European view of the mind and consciousness. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st US, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 382 pages. A biography of Ivan Turgenev, 19th-century Russian writer. The book is not a critical examination of Turgenev's literary output, but, of the man himself - enigmatic and unknown - and the world in which he lived, and the people he knew and associated with. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown & Company , 1st US, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 194 pages. Translated by Ewald Osers. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, John Day/Reynal & Hitchcock, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan cloth, 119 pages. B&w line illustrations by Bernadine Custer. Rudyard Kipling lived with his wife on a small estate in Dummerston, Vermont, in a house they built called Naulakha, from 1892 to 1896. It was while he was here that he wrote both "The Jungle Book" and "Captains Courageous". Kipling would have been content to live out his life there but in 1896, a dispute arose between the Kiplings an a neighbor led to a court case and the Kiplings left Vermont never to return. This volume, written by a Dummerston native and historian, tells the story of that dispute. Lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, very good.
Hardcover. Iowa City, University Of Iowa Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the half-title page. 268 pages. In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harper Collins, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. Authors, illustrators, and poets describe their childhoods, approaches to creating children's books, and career paths.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st U.S., 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 250 pages. Light blue and tan cloth cover, gilt lettering, very little wear. Dust jacket has minor wear to edges. Inside is bright and clean. A nice copy.
Hardcover. Albuquerque NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 217 pages. Includes essays on William Everson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Nathaniel Tarn, Thom Gunn and more. Notes, bibliography. Clean copy.
Softcover. Los Angeles, CA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Reprint, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 77 pages. Softcover. Augustan Reprint Society. Pamphlet with staple binding. Light tanning to cover, cover is becoming detached from bound pages. No pages missing or ripped. Very good condition. Previous owner's name written on front cover. Some underlining and brief notes written inside (pencil)."The most satisfactory of Collins' many pamphlets and books..."
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Tanning to rear endpapers otherwise clean, very good in an unclipped dust jacket.
Hardcover. NY, Norton, 2nd pr., 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 318 pages. SIGNED BY RICH on title page. Light soil to dust-jacket.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 62 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Fading to spine and along left edge of front cover. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Gale Group, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 195 pages, b&w illustrations. A scholarly examination of Camus's famous short novel. Like new, clean.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1971, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 378 pages. From dust jacket notes: "For most Americans, the Second World War started on December 7, 1941, and much of the fighting took place in strange, faraway places. For the British, the war started on September 3, 1939, and much of the action took place in the skies over England. In the spring of 1940, after months of uneasy calm, Germany invaded the Lowlands and conquered France within a few days, leaving England without her only meaningful ally on the Continent. A year would pass before the Soviet Union was drawn into the war, and eighteen months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The United Kingdom, with a land area about the size of Wyoming, was alone, all alone, with only the Straits of Dover separating the island from Hitler's war machine. For six years Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war for The New Yorker magazine from her native England. Even at the height of the air war over London, when 'all that is best in the good life of civilized effort appears to be slowly and painfully keeling over,' she continued to file her fortnightly reports in an understated but dramatic fashion that reflected the fortitude of her fellow countrymen: 'The announcements of the first air-raid deaths are beginning to appear in the obituary columns of the morning papers. No mention is made of the cause of death, but the conventional phrase "very suddenly" is always used.' William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, has assembled Miss Panter-Downes' 'Letter from London' columns into a consecutive, on-the-spot chronicle of the war in England."
Hardcover. Little Rock AK, Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 358 pages. For those who care about literature or simply love a good laugh (or both), Charles Portis has long been one of America's most admired novelists. His 1968 novel True Grit is fixed in the contemporary canon, and four more have been hailed as comic masterpieces. Now, for the first time, his other writings--journalism, travel stories, short fiction, memoir, and even a play--have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, his first new book in more than twenty years. All the familiar Portis elements are here: picaresque adventures, deadpan humor, an expert eye for detail and keen ear for the spoken word, and encounters with oddball characters both real and imagined. The collection encompasses the breadth of his fifty-year writing career, from his gripping reportage of the civil rights movement for the New York Herald Tribune to a comic short story about the demise of journalism in the 21st century. New to even the most ardent fan is his three-act play, Delray's New Moon, performed onstage in 1996 and published here for the first time.
Hardcover. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1st UK, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn , unclipped dust jacket. A biography of poet Harry Crosby, who inexplicably took the life of another man's bride of six months, and subsequently his own life, in 1929. INSCRIBED BY WOLFF on the blank prelim page: "To the yeoman of Chittenden, and to Steve, from the guy whose fat they pulled from the fire/Geoffrey Wolff/Repayment Day, 1977/Waitsfield, Vt".
Hardcover. University Park, Pa., Penn State University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 348 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Baudelaire's illustrations throughout. Minor dust jacket edge wear, otherwise, very clean, bright and tight copy.
Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1st US, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 300 pages, maroon cloth covers with a chipped, edgeworn dust jacket. A collection of scholarly essays with subjects from Herodotus to Kipling, from Greek and Roman literature to Shakespeare.
Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 521 pages. The fourth volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. Covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Godine, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 210 pages. Hilary Masters' memoir Last Stands exhibits uniqueness in writing with a universal appeal. Whether it be upper class zeal, lower class pride, war stories, grandparents, grandchildren, health, humor, abuse, neglect, tolerance, strength, or even food, there is something in it for everyone. Overall, Last Stands is a patchwork piece--a memoir and indirect autobiography glittered with several familial biographies. Masters constantly switches scenes and elements of focus, but he overlaps his storyline, keeping the reader grounded, despite a sequence of simultaneous events. Thus, history is tied together in a busy but logical manner. Although Masters reveals disturbing events, he adds tidbits of humor to lighten the mood. In addition, he compares and contrasts fictitious characters, such as Odysseus, to events in his own life--a technique that grants him boundless points-of-view. Furthermore, his ingenuity unfolds with his use of secondary sources: letters, poems, epitaphs, and invitations. Finally, his use of dialogue carries the story where it might otherwise seem bland.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 352 pages, several b&w woodcut illustrations. Black cloth spine with marbled boards, top edge gilt. Minor corner wear.
Hardcover. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1st, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 485 pages. Hardcover with red cloth covers.SIGNED BY DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER on front fly leaf. Light fraying to edges, fading, otherwise tight.
Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as 'the poet laureate of appetite' (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch collects many of his food pieces for the first time - and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York , HarperChildrens, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 240 pages. Clean, tight copy. As children, C.S. Lewis and his brother W.H. Lewis created the fantasy world of Boxen. This book collects stories and illustrations, history, geography etc of Boxen. Reproduced original illustrations by the authors. Introduction by Douglas Gresham. The History of Boxen by Walter Hooper.
Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 395 pages. The third volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. This volume begins with the writer's return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly faded dust jacket. 569 pages, b&w photos. An authentic church father of the Post-Reformation era, the Basel professor's contributions to theology, the life of the church, and the world of culture and politics have been frequently noted. This work presents extraordinary new information and insight based on his own correspondence and notes.What one finds in this work is Barth's own running commentary on events and people - from 1886 to 1968. Everything is depicted from his perspective and chiefly in his own words, and this is precisely what makes the volume so fascinating and valuable. The brilliance, wit, and humanity of Barth shine through everywhere as he is seen as son, brother, student, editor, friend, pastor, husband, father, soldier, teacher, theologian, church leader, political critic, polemicist, ecumenist, author, preacher, music lover, senior citizen. Light pencil notes to margins to some pages.
Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Still in shrink-wrap. Spine faded. Else very good. As the acclaimed author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines (b. 1933) has been publishing stories and novels for more than sixty years. His brilliant portrayals of race, community, and culture in rural south Louisiana have made him one of the most respected and beloved living American writers. Ernest J. Gaines: Conversations brings together the author's own thoughts and words in interviews that range from 1994 to 2017, discussing his life, his work, and his literary legacy. The interviews cover all of Gaines's works, including his two latest books, Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays (2005) and The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017). The book provides a retrospective of his work from the viewpoint of a senior writer, now eighty-five years old, and gives an important international perspective on Gaines and his work.
Hardcover. NY, Rinehart & Co., 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 241 pages. The author Cook was an English professor at Middlebury College for many years, and involved with Bread Loaf Writer's Conference almost from its inception, as Robert Frost was. INSCRIBED by Robert Frost (the subject) to Cook (the author).
Hardcover. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ Press, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 351 pages including index. A list of writing relating to Charles Dickens and his works 1836-1944. A very useful bibliographic reference for Dickensiana.
Hardcover. London, The Art Union of London, 1st thus, 1851, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, half-leather, maroon calf over maroon boards with gllt rules, spine with gilt decorated raised bands and lettering. Portrait frontispiece by J[ohn] Gilbert after Sir Joshua Reynolds. 14 pages of Goldsmith's verse followed by 30 plates engraved on wood by J.Thompson, W.T.Green, J.W.Whymper, G.Dalziel, E.Dalziel, &c. after the designs of C.Stanfield, J.Leech, E.H.Corbould, W.L.Leitch, E.M.Ward & others. Some cloth fade to covers, front fly leaf gone, bookplate on inside front cover. Mild foxing.
Hardcover. London , Macmillan, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 268 pages, illustrated with facsimile drawings and 8 collotype plates. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf. Blue cloth spine faded.
Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages. Name on front fly leaf whited out, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 410 pages, b&w illustrations. Best known as the author of "Windows for the Crown Prince, " an account of her years as English tutor to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, Elizabeth Gray Vining now tells the full story of her life, including impressions of Japan that she omitted from her earlier book. Previous owner'e signature on Front fly leaf otherwise clean.
Hardcover. New York: , Henry Holt, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 210 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with minor if any wear to edges.
NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 188 pages. SIGNED BY OFFUTT on title-page.
Hardcover. NY, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 266 pages. Christian religion's influence on secular Victorian culture, especially literature. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans Publishing , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 199 pages. A brief account of Williams' life and examination of his early poems, the criticism, biographies and plays, the novels, the Arthurian poems and his theological writings. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with minor wear. 532 pages. An essential guide to the life and work of one of America's most controversial writers, Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics.
Hardcover. Boston, The Beacon Press, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray cloth covers, 289 pages. 12 pages of b&w photos. Fifty years of letters (1899-1949) by the crusader for liberal and humane causes as well as Jewish rights. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY/London, Palgrave , 2nd Ed., 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 244 pages. Taking into account recent developments in historical and ecological criticism, and incorporating fresh research into poetry and politics in the 1790s, the second edition of The Politics of Nature enlarges and updates Nicholas Roe's acclaimed study of Romanticism. Hitherto marginal figures are restored to prominence, and there is new material on William Wordsworth's radical years.
Hardcover. NY, Pegasus, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 338 pages, b&w illustrations. A remarkable literary hybrid--part biography, part detective story--about the enduring figure of Robinson Crusoe. January 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty,Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore--Robinson Crusoe. Several miles south, another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume--published nearly forty years before.Knox's Historical Relation was a best seller when it was published in 1681, just a year after he escaped from Ceylon and returned to England. Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the intertwined lives of two real men, Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox, and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero: the story of Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and of Robert Knox, the man who was Crusoe. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 422 pages. Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians -- along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the 'art of losing' that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem 'One Art' --perhaps her most famous-- was linked in equal part to an 'art of finding,' Like new.
Hardcover. London/Gainsbourgh, Osborne and Griffin & H. Mozley, reprint, 1788, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with brown calf spine. 240 pages. Spine shows no title. With a Curious and Useful Appendix. Title page states: A New Edition, Enlarged, Improved, and Corrected. Very nice condition, solid binding with normal edgewear to corners and edges of spine. Names on inside front cover, otherwise a clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown & Co, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 304 pages, b&w illustrations by Consuelo Hanks. Combines a natural history of the Atlantic blue crab with an historical and ecological study of Chesapeake Bay and a chronicle of the commercial crabber's year. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in a dust jacket with fading to some areas, 338 pages. Margaret Fuller - journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist - traveled in Europe between 1846 and 1850 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. Her letters from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches, soon became moving accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. These dispatches are now reproduced in their entirety for the first time. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1942, a timid, inexperienced twenty-one-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the US Army. This title tells the story of this young man's exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, Clean copy.