Rare & Out-of-Print Literature Books

Hardcover. Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Blue cloth covers with embossed design, gilt lettering on spine. Writings from the author best known for "The Story of an African Farm". 214 pages, no markings. Owner's small embossed stamp on front fly leaf.

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.

Hardcover. Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare Head Press, Ltd. Ed., 1908, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Eight hardcover volumes. The complete set published in an edition of 1060 copies. This set bound in gray boards with green cloth spines. Black lettering to spines, title pages in red and black, untrimmed edges. Mild wear to boards, Vol. 6 with cracked hinges and some pencil marking, otherwise a clean set. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE AND WEIGHT, This is a heavy and oversized book and will require extra shipping. International customers please ask for a shipping quote before purchasing.

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 1946. The story of Pretzel, the longest dachshund in the world, his wife Greta and five children. 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. 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.

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, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 180 pages. The author of the Travis McGee series relates his family's experiences with and high jinx of their pets, two tomcats and a goose. 4 leaves of b&w photo plates. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise tight and clean.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean copy.

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. 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. NY, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 482 pages. In this book Professor Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. This large historical argument is developed through monographic chapters on the poets which include close readings of their major poems. Clean 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, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 627 pages, b&w illustrations. The literary, political, and artistic interests of poet and cultural icon Stephen Spender (1909-1995) are illuminated in this narrative based on his private papers, tracing his rise to success as a poet in the 1930s through his later years as cultural statesman of the twentieth century, and examining his relationships with such luminaries as Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot, and Virgina Woolf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 145 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. The renown Frank Norris attained in his brief lifetime sprang from his compelling--and to many Americans startling--novels about people whose lives have escaped their control and have become grotesquely warped by the confluent forces of hereditary and environment.In "revisiting" Frank Norris, Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. takes as a starting point Warren French's 1962 volume in this series and provides a complementary portrait of the artist. McElrath assesses the spate of relatively recent "historical reconstructions" of Norris's canon and finds a writer who, though at times transcendent in the Naturalistic vein, was pragmatic in his choice of subject matter and "not always grandly serious." It is in part the delight Norris took in parody, McElrath argues, that makes him still so readable. Clean copy.

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.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with light tanning to edges. 214 pages with a pictorial section in rear. Stated first printing on copyright page. The story of the building of birch-bark canoes and of a 150 mile trip through the Maine woods in those graceful survivors of a prehistoric technology.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 696 pages. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. London, Between the Lines, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages. A 17,000 word interview, with a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, and a representative list of quotations from Heaney's critics and reviewers. Also included is Heaney's poem, 'Known World'. Spine faded, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket with short closed tears. 14 original and thoughtful interviews - Burroughs discusses Paris in the 50s, the Olympia Press and the issue of obscenity, Norman Mailer on the Jack Abbott issue, Paul Theroux on Americans abroad, Scott Spencer on the experience of having a movie made from his book 'Endless Love' and more. Biographical information and photographs of each author. 324 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 302 pages. Celebrated Author Roger Angell has warmly Inscribed to an friend and signed on the title page ("For Carl - All best, Roger Angell ". The book contains the childhood baseball recollections from America's premier observer of the world of baseball and life. Angell was the long time contributor to The New Yorker. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 306 pages. Morse Peckham "considers the various roles played by pornography, especially within that hateful siege of contraries which constitutes stability and innovation." Chapters: What is Pornography?, The Art in Pornography, An Explanation for Pornography, Pornography and Culture.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, reprint, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn and lightly soiled dust jacket, unclipped with $4.50 price. Essays on a wide range of topics, including the assassination of Gandhi, Vassar, anti-Semitism, the Communist party, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, etc. No first printing indicated so assumed 2nd pr. No markings.

Hardcover. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly rubbed dust jacket, 290 pages. These brief essays appeared in a regular column that Rexroth did for The Saturday Review of Literature. The subjects include many of the standard classic texts from world literature, i.e., Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Gibbon, Whitman, Tolstoy, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 516 pages. A biography of a brilliant literary figure, a poet, critic, political and social reformer of mid-nineteenth century America. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 177 pages. In this edition of Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments and other writings, Richard Bellamy draws on recent Italian scholarship to show how Beccaria wove together the various political languages of the Enlightenment into a political philosophy that combines republican, contractarian, romantic and liberal as well as utilitarian themes. This edition also includes a number of pieces from Beccaria's writings on political economy and the history of civilization that were not previously available in English. Clean 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.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Claredon Press, 1st, 1888, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 690 pages plus 3 folding maps in rear. Greek text with English introduction and commentary. Ex-library copy with light stamping, residue. Rebound with spine labels. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. Syracuse, N.Y., Syracuse University, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 241 pages. Light edge wear, soiling to price-clipped dust jacket. Foxing to top and fore-edge. Covers slightly warped. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2008, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 873 pages. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters-they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing-and often very funny-interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1998-10-26, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 181 pages, illustrated throughout with photos in b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. In this moving autobiography, Lois Lowry explores her rich history through personal photographs, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. Lowry's writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the opportunity to travel into the real world that is her life.

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. London, Hogarth Press, Reprint, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket. 206 pages. Ex-library copy with minimal marking. Clean, tight copy.

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. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1st , 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 246 pages. Previous owner's signature on front flyleaf. Light spotting to edges. Very minor rubbing to cover edges. A nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, Reprint, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 321 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with light wear to edges & black titles to spine. Faint soil to top edge. Otherwise clean inside and out. Tight copy.

Hardcover. Middlebury, VT, Paul Eriksson, 1st collected ed., 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket. The relationship between the novelist and his editor Pascal Covici. Some fade, light wear to dj. Steinbeck and Covici is a major contribution to the literature about John Steinbeck. "Steinbeck Quarterly" magazine wrote, "Thomas Fensch offers the first comprehensive account of one of John Steinbeck's most enduring, intimate, and important relationships: his association with his editor, Pascal Covici. The results are revealing, and broaden the dimension of Steinbeck studies." This book was first published in l979 and received not one, but two separate reviews in "The New York Times." It was also widely reviewed elsewhere and won the Book of the Year Award in Biogaphy from the Ohioana Library Association, in l980.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Bros., 1st US, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Black & white photos by Bryan & Norman Westwood. Previous owner's signature on front end paper.

Hardcover. New York , Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages, illustrated throughout with b&w photographs by Bob Adelman. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Bowling Green Press, 1st, 1927, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 59 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. SIGNED and NUMBERED #824 of 1240. Pages darkening on edges, only light wear to cover boards.

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 337 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Essays by the New York City cultural critic; examines the work of artists, filmmakers and writers ranging from Anton Chekov to J. K. Rowling, including Stanley Kubrick, The Sopranos, Sex in the City, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Barbara Kingsolver. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. In a bright dust jacket. Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver.

Softcover. NY, Semiotext(e)/MIT, 1st transl., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages. Letters by writer, filmmaker, and cultural revolutionary Guy Debord conjure a vivid picture of the dynamic first years of the Situationist International movement. Debord's letters-published here for the first time in English-provide a fascinating insider's view of just how this seemingly disorganized group drifting around a newly consumerized Paris became one of the most defining cultural movements of the twentieth century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, J. And P. Knapton, S. Birt, T. Longman, et al., 1st thus, 1747, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Eight volumes, in uniform red calf with ornate gilt decorations to covers, spines. All edges gilt. Prefaces by William Warburton and Alexander Pope. Mild foxing to pages. Vol. 1 with a frontispiece engraving of Shakespeare. An attractive set with light shelf wear, minor soiling. Bindings firm.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 480 pages. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well--a virtual Who's Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and TheNew York Times, among other adversaries. The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal's life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal's life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal--novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights--has long needed.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 341 pages. This is the first collection of essays in seven years by the author of Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Fiction and the Figures of Life. In it, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Gale Group, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 196 pages, b&w illustrations. A scholarly examination of Camus and his work. Like new, clean.

Hardcover. NY, Da Capo Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs. Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, and leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs -- formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg) -- as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Softcover. NY, Applause, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 896 pages. A facsimile edition of the original 1623 publication of the bard's works. Recounts the background of the first folio, the earliest and most authoritative collection of Shakespeare's thirty-six plays.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.