fiction history

Hardcover. Boston, Dana Estes & Co., 1st, 1900, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, tan cloth stamped in green, red and blue. 112 pages with b&w drawings by Bridgeman and others. Small corner chips to 3 pages, name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Estes and Lauriat, 1st, 1897, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 265 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. 8 black & white drawings by George Foster Barnes. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise excellent condition, illustrated cover with gilt lettering on spine.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations by Egielski. Very nice, clean condition. Wittily sending up the "child prodigy'' (if not biography, history, and high seriousness itself), Yorinks and Egielski trace the course of Minski's genius. A child of the 18th Century, Minski prankishly ``discovers'' gravity and electricity, soon followed by his serene introduction of the telephone, airplane, automobile, aspirin, light bulb, etc. Leonardo da Vinci appears in 18th-Century Vienna to applaud Minski's ``noodle.'' But when Minski hears the (historical) Farinelli sing, he labors feverishly on a formula to transform himself from scientist to artist, and achieves a triumphant apotheosis as ``unequaled singer.'' Egielski's exuberantly detailed, warmly colored pictures make the most of the anachronisms, the caricatures, and the Old World setting.

Hardcover. Norwalk, CT, Easton Press, Collector's Ed., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 199 pages. Black leather bound, gilt lettering and design. Raised bands. All edges gilt. Patterned end papers. Collector's notes laid in. Introduction by Larry Niven. Illustrated with full-color, full-page, plates by A. C. Farley, printed on glossy stock. A 1953 novel of alternate history. The point of divergence occurs when the Confederate States of America wins the Battle of Gettysburg and subsequently declares victory in the "War of Southron Independence" on July 4, 1864 after the surrender of the United States of America.

Hardcover. Neshannock PA, Hermes Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. Included in this volume are two more years of the strip, from 1934 to 1936 and features five complete adventures. Volume Four also features a special 16-page introductory essay by noted science-fiction writer and pop culture historian Ron Goulart, and an afterword detailing interesting details about the history of the strip and its impact on science fiction.

Hardcover. Hermes, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. Included in this volume are two more years of the strip, from 1936 to 1938, which features four complete adventures - "Prisoners on Uranus" (5/13/35 to 12/16/35)- "Liquid Light" (12/17/35 to 2/19/36) - "Mummies of Ceres" (2/20/36 to 4/15/36)- "Palladian Space Pirates" (4/16/36 to 12/4/36). Volume Three also features a special 16-page introductory essay and an afterword detailing interesting details about the history of the strip and its impact on science and science-fiction.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 324 pages. Minor foxing to top edge, else like new in clear brodart cover. "An electrifying, magnificently and hilariously dark novel about an army and subculture wallowing in peacetime, Buffalo Soldiers catches the martial spin of history much as Catch-22 and Dog Soldiers did in their day."

Hardcover. Chicago IL, Fleming H. Revell, reprint, 1902, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. 402 pages. Contains two-tone plate illustrations by E. S. Paxson. Previous owner's signature front end paper. Edgewear. Spine and corner rubbed.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 196 pages.One night out of the blue, Ratchet Clark's ill-natured mother tells her that Ratchet will be leaving their Pensacola apartment momentarily to take the train up north. There she will spend the summer with her aged relatives Penpen and Tilly, inseparable twins who couldn't look more different from each other. Staying at their secluded house, Ratchet is treated to a passel of strange family history and local lore, along with heaps of generosity and care that she has never experienced before. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harper, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Blue covers, black spine with gilt titles, color illustrrated dust jacket with acetate protective covering. Light rubbing and edgewear to dust jacket, light age discoloration to endpapers, previous owner's pencil notations to rear endpaper, pages clean, crisp and unmarked; a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown , 1st, 1897, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 358 pages plus 4 pages of ads. Green cloth boards with a bright gilt design. Previous owners signature on front endpaper. Otherwise clean, tight copy. Historical fiction concerning Shay's Rebellion.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Novel of Early California during the period when United States adventurers were beginning to move in and take over. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Lee & Shepard, 1st, 1868, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 263 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Orange covers with black stamped decorations and gilt panel on spine. Gutter cracked throughout. Rear hinge starting. Captain John Hardy, Retired, a weather-beaten, somewhat eccentric old sea dog of 59 recounts the exciting, sometimes amusing tale of his running away from home at eighteen to become a sailor/mate on a ship bound for the Arctic seas to hunt seals to harvest their valuable pelts.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown , 1st, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Color frontispiece, b&w illustrations by Margaret Freeman. Hardcover, 320 pages. Decorated brown cloth.

Hardcover. New York , T. Y. Crowell, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 56 pages, illustrated in b&w by Margot Tomes and with photographs. Bright, unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Ariel/ Farrar Straus Cudahy, 1st, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, unclipped. A moving portrait of the young Abraham Lincoln awakening to early powers. B&w illustrations by Douglas Gorsline. 90 pages.

Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1st US, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 423 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy. With "humanism, generosity, and a passionate, beating heart" (The Times, London), Janice Galloway's Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann. In her lifetime, Clara was a celebrated concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms -- as well as mother of the eight Schumann children and caretaker of her husband through a series of crippling mental illnesses. In its luminous integrity the novel brings Clara Schumann to life as a woman of genius. Galloway is at once a meticulous researcher of her subjects' remarkable and highly dramatic artistic careers and a virtuoso storyteller whose imagination and empathy lead her to that place off limits to history and biography -- inside the human mind. Distilling the memories, poetry, and musical notes therein, she examines the ways artists divine patterns out of life's chaos. "Passion," writes Galloway of Clara's performance philosophy, "one might take for granted -- its control is the mechanism through which all else flows." Though music may have bent to Clara's will, love served her far more tragically. Dismissing the cliches of Great Art and rejecting the romantic conflation of Madness and Creativity, Clara boldly ventures that in a life marred by alienation and isolation, "Work alone endures."

Philadelphia, Westminster Press, Reprint, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages. Black & white illustrations and color dust jacket drawing by James Hough. Crease to top of page 16. Dust jacket with top & bottom of spine worn.

Hardcover. London, The Folio Society, 1st illust thus, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, decorative boards with black slipcase. 445 pages, color frontispiece and 12 color plates by David Hughes. First published in 1938, recounting the life of the Byzantine general Belisarius (AD 500-565), It was not a peaceful time for the Roman empire. Invaders threatened all fronts, but they grew to respect and fear the name of Belisarius, Emperor Justinian's greatest general. With this book Robert Graves again demonstrates his command of a vast historical subject, creating a startling and vivid picture of a decadent era. Forward by Lindsey Davis. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Sun Dial Press, Inc., Reprint, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 269 pages. Hardcover. Reprint. Price clipped dust jacket with darkening to spine, chipping along edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Covici-Friede, 2nd pr., 1936, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 269 pages. Previous owners name and the number "10" on front endpaper. Top edge stained black. Price clipped dust jacket with light chipping along edges. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 144 pages. An illustrated history of the fabulous pulp magazines from 1896 to 1953. After tracing the birth of the pulps back to the 1882 launching of Golden Argosy magazine, printed on pulpwood pages, Server organizes his unwieldy subject into categories of pulps: adventure, romance and sex, horror and fantasy, private eye, weird menace, science fiction. Each receives a lively capsule history that covers trends, reader (and sometimes, as in the case of the ``Spicys,'' government) response, and writers' bios--which, though sketchy (Hammett's Hollywood experience gets one sentence), resurrect a number of relatively obscure but seminal and fascinating figures, like Conan- creator Robert E. Howard, who shot himself dead at age 30 on the day his mother died, and Frederick Faust (a.k.a. Max Brand), who sometimes wrote around the clock, piling up two or three million words a year. Server attributes the pulps' demise to, among other factors, the advent of TV, paperbacks, and comic books, and he winds up with a note on pulp-collecting. For all of the author's savvy, though, it's above all the eye- popping illustrations (100 color, 57 b&w) that will have readers beaming. Magazine covers (some lurid, some of eerie beauty), sample pages of text and ads (``Raise Giant Frogs'')--the pulps come alive once again here, in all their eccentric glory.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Macrae Smith Company, 1st thus, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with bright blue, green and gilt design to front cover and spine. Romance of America's History series. Stated First Edition. Includes 8 color plates by N.C. Wyeth, Frank E. Schoonover, Stanley Arthurs and Charles Hargens. Many b&w drawings in text by various artists. Includes chapters by Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Jack London, J.F. Cooper, et al. Woodcut engraved endpapers, color frontis, 506 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. America has had a love affair with the hard-boiled detective since the 1920s, when Prohibition called into question who really stood on the right and wrong side of the law. And nowhere did this hero shine more than in crime fiction. In Detectives in the Shadows, literary and cultural critic Susanna Lee tracks the evolution of this truly American character type from Race Williams to Philip Marlowe and from Mike Hammer to Jessica Jones. Lee explores how this character type morphs to fit an increasingly troubled world, offering compelling interpretations of The Wire, True Detective, and Jessica Jones. 216 pages, clean copy.