Hardcover. London, Allen Lane, 2008, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The writings of Lewis Carroll have inspired and entertained generations of readers and have influenced the work of everyone from James Joyce to John Lennon. But the extraordinary imagination that created Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, was not limited simply to fantasy, logic and word play. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was for many years lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and published works in the fields of geometry, logic and algebra. He also made significant contributions to subjects as varied as voting patterns and the design of tennis tournaments, and he created large numbers of imaginative recreational puzzles based on mathematical ideas. For the first time, Lewis Carroll in Numberland explores both his serious and his recreational work and places it in the context of his many other activities, mathematical and otherwise. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Hutchinson, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lughtly worn dust jacket. 589 pages. Light shelf wear, chipping and closed tear to dust jacket. Review slip laid in.
Hardcover. Watertown, MA, Charlesbridge, reprint , 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, non-paginated. Extensive b&w woodcut illustrations throughout. Gilt titles on spine and cover. Color illustration on front cover. Clean, unmarked copy.
Softcover. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 355 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to paper wrappers. In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers--Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe--demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics.
Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 248 pages. Errata slip laid in. Name on blank prelim pages. Otherwise clea.
Hardcover. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1974-1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, All six volumes. Hardcover with dust jackets. Release dates range from 1974-1981. All first editions. Volume six has clipped dust jacket. Light fraying to dust jackets otherwise, clean, tight copies. Decorative staining on top text block. Black and white dust jacket.
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. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2nd pr., 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 414 pages, b&w illustrations. Very good, clean, in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. World famous at twenty-four, brilliant and reckless, hard-living and scandalous, Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he ever experienced war first-hand. So true was his portrait of a young man who runs from his first confrontation with battle that Civil War veterans argued about whose regiment Crane had been in. Considered by H.G. Wells as "beyond dispute, the best writer of our generation," Crane was also famous in his time as an unforgettable personality, an Adonis with tawny hair and gray-blue eyes that Willa Cather described as "full of luster and changing lights." A lover of women and truth at any cost, Crane, in his short life, paid dearly for both. He alienated the New York police when he testified against a policeman on behalf of a prostitute falsely accused of soliciting, forcing him to live the rest of his short life as an expatriate in England. Reporting on the Spanish American War, Crane described the Rough Riders blundering into a trap after arriving in Cuba, infuriating Roosevelt. He died tragically young, leaving behind a handful of fine short stories, including The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel, along with war reporting, novels, and poetry.
NY, Coward-McCann, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt title on spine, 383 pages. INSCRIBED BY ROREM on front fly leaf. Clean copy, lacks dust jacket.
Softcover. NY, Grove Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 239 pages. Hettie Jones presents an intimate memoir of her life--from her middle-class Jewish family in Queens to her marriage to the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones and her search for her own artistic voice. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st US, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 384 pages. Bookplate on inside front cover, small name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages. This book concerns itself with the different ways in which money is used, the relationships which then arise, and the institutions concerned in maintaining its various functions. Thomas Crump examines the emergence of institutions with familiar and distinctive monetary roles: the state, the market and the banking system. However, other uses of money - such as for gambling or the payment of fines - are also taken into account, in an exhaustive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject, which extends far beyond the range of conventional treatises on money. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Pierre SD, South Dakota Historical Society Press, 1st, 2114, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Hidden away since the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder s never-before-published autobiography reveals the true stories of her pioneering life. Some of her experiences will be familiar; some will be a surprise. Pioneer Girl re-introduces readers to the woman who defined the pioneer experience for millions of people around the world. Through her recollections, Wilder details the Ingalls family s journey from Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory sixteen years of travels, unforgettable stories, and the everyday people who became immortal through her fiction. Using additional manuscripts, diaries, and letters, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography builds on Wilder s work by adding valuable context and explores her growth as a writer. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 194 pages. Includes a bibliography of Bannerman's books and 47 reproductions of the first British and first American editions and her illustrations for them. Phyllis Yuill and Justin Schiller helped with the publishing history and supplied illustrations. Hay shows that it was the illustrations of later artists that provoked the controversy over THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, not Bannerman's original text or pictures. Bound in the original gilt-stamped red boards. From the dust jacket: "This first biography of Helen Bannerman covers much new ground and is based on the vast collection of letters to the children, usually lovingly illustrated, in the possession of the Bannerman family. As well as telling the story of one of the most popular children's books of all time, Elizabeth Hay's biography offers an intimate picture of the daily life of a British memsahib in the heyday of the Raj." Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1982, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 191 pages, green cloth covers. A scarce study of the Caribbean writer which has been heavily annotated and underlined by Joyce Adler, the previous owner. Adler was a literary scholar and published two books on Harris herself.
Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 947 pages. Complete in one volume. Revised and annotated by Charles S. Singleton. Singleton preserves the genius of Payne's language and style, but removes the Victorianisms that intrude upon the enjoyment of contemporary readers. He adds essential annotation and original interpretation to round out this unexcelled English edition of Boccaccio's great work. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 387 pages. Focusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, A Local Habitation and a Name examines the unstable dialectic of "reality" and "imagination," as well as of "history" and "literature." Albert Ascoli identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical discourses and circumstances, and he equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, he poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise. Mild damp wrinkle to bottom corner of first 10 pages, otherwise very good, clean.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 214 pages. Hardcover. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Edited by Robert Phelps, these letters, averaging three per day, prove that Colette was her own best character.
Hardcover. NY, William Morrow,, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 309 pages, b&w illustrations. Novelist Anne Bernays and biographer Justin Kaplan -- both native New Yorkers -- came of age in the 1950s, when the pent-up energies of the Depression years and World War II were at flood tide. Written in two separate voices, Back Then is the candid, anecdotal account of these two children of privilege -- one from New York's East Side, the other from the West Side -- pursuing careers in publishing and eventually leaving to write their own books. Infused with intelligence and charm, Back Then is an elegant reflection on the transformative years in the lives of two young people and New York City. Marked by their youthful passions, this double memoir marries the authors' distinct literary styles with a riveting narrative that captures the density and texture of private, social, and working life in the 1950s. Clean copy.
Softcover. Santa Cruz CA, Kayak Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, tan wrappers with paper label on front, 48 pages. Pictures by Douglas McClellan. An uncommon experimental work, 1000 copies printed.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. A young English novelist's journey through the Soviet Union in the early sixties (author also wrote "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner', "The General", and others. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean copy.
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".