Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 970 pages. Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right language and tone to capture America's broken twilight landscape at a moment of headlong conflict and change. Remainder dot to bottom edge, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1st US, 1895, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 425 pages, with publisher's advertisement in back. Decorated cover and illustrations throughout. Corner and edge wear and fray, previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf, and spine soiling. Otherwise, clean and tight copy.
Hardcover. New York, Longmans, Green and Co., 6th, 1909, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 475 pages. Hardcover with dark green covers, gilt lettering and dog illustration in gilt on front. Gutter cracked throughout and repaired in places. Previous owner's writing on front fly leaf. Cover boards fraying at corners and small rips to top spine with small piece missing.
Hardcover. New York, St. Martin's Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 1st book, SIGNED BY ERMELINO. Stamped #s on front end paper, & half-title page.
Hardcover. Philadelphia, John C. Winston Company, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket that has a paper scar to spine where label was removed. Illustrated on dj and cover of a man standing at a bar. B&w illustrations by Jack Gallagher. A satiric view of tipplers, depicted in the character of a Falstaffian American male apparently meant to counteract the caticature of prohibition and prohibitionists as a pinch-faced old spoil sport put forth by the cartoonist Rollin Kirby in the "New York World."
Hardcover. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR. No dust jacket. Author's first book. 214 pages. Light wear to edges of cover. Minor foxing on edges, but inside pages are clean and bright. A tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux , reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Young William Jones is on a desperate search through darkest London for John Diamond, the son of a man his father apparently once cheated badly. Will he find him? Originally published in the United States in 1980 as"Footsteps", the novel combines a cast of remarkable eccentrics with superb sensory descriptions. The title was a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book.
Hardcover. Boston, Usher & Strickland, 1st, 1841, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 216 pages, embossed brown cloth covers, gilt on spine. An autobiographical narrative with temperance leanings. Much on nautical life from the seaman's perspective: whaling, slave trade and daily life aboard a ship. Three page preface signed L.C. Scarce. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise very good.
Hardcover. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages. This book offers eleven essays on Fante's career, ranging from close thematic analysis of individual stories and novels to broadly informed assessments of Fante's life and art in the context of his times. Major areas explored in the book include Fante's treatment of the Italian-American experience; his relationship to other American writers of the 1930s and beyond; the deeply Catholic nature of Fante's fiction; his unique and still-seminal vision of Los Angeles; and his lifelong concern to render in fiction both the comedy and the horrors of the writing life. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1902, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 365 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Colored decoration on front cover, light rubbing. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf.
Hardcover. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st Edition, 1894, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 513 pages. Hardcover. Light green boards with dark green and gold gilt decoration on front cover and spine. Some light chipping to edges and corners of boards. Previous owner's inscription dated "Xmas 1894". Pages lightly tanned with age, otherwise unmarked.
Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 860 pages. Writing with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, and the small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, John O'Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, "to record the way people talked and thought and felt . . . with complete honesty." Praised by contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wrote about sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of its time. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than any other writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of short story featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear and skillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as Raymond Carver. Bringing together sixty stories written over four decades--the largest, most comprehensive collection of O'Hara's stories ever published--former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting new perspective on one of American literature's master storytellers. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Armchair Detective Library], 1st thus, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Originally published in 1968 as a paperback.
Springfield, MA, Milton Bradley, 1st , 1928, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with yellow lettering. Previous owner's inscription on prelim page. Chipping to lettering on spine otherwise very good. Color frontis, b&w plates. Colorful map of West Indies on endpapers.
Hardcover. New York, Bloomsbury USA, 1st US, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 782 pages. Hardcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Features black & white illustrations by Portia Rosenberg. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 207 pages with 24 publishers pages in rear. B&w frontispiece and 3 b&w illustrations by Harold Copping. Cover lightly soiled with minor rubbing and edgewear. Inscription by previous owner on front flyleaf. A clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd pr., 1934, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 428 pages. "Published June 6, 1934 First and Second Printings before Publication" on copyright page. Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. The first volume in Mann's great tetralogy, telling the story of the Biblical Joseph's rise as a statesman in Egypt, his conduct during the epic famine, and his restoration to his father Jacob. Bookplate on inside front cover, small notation on rear dj flap, otherwise a clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st , 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 435 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. Short closed tear to dust jacket bottom edge, dust jacket top edge has light bumping and minor fading. Unmarked, a clean and tight copy.
Softcover. New York, Pocket Books/Permabooks, 1st, 1943, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 242 pages. Paperback. Pocket Book #193. Chipping to spine edges. Moderate creasing to wrappers.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st , 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 40 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Illust. by Leonard Weisgard in 3-colors. Light soil to dj, front flap clipped at bottom.
Hardcover. NY, Delacorte, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 83 pages. This slim novel concerns a family trying to fill the gaping void left by the loss of a mother. The author's clipped dialogue and meticulously pared-down descriptions convey a deceptive simplicity--there are deep, intricate rumblings beneath the surface calm of MacLachlan's words. When his mother walks out on 11-year-old Journey and his older sister, Cat, the boy refuses to believe she will not return. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Racine WI, Whitman Publishing, 1st, 1942, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, edgeworn dust jacket. Story based on the popular radio series, Captain Midnight. World War II adventure novel for young adults, set on a hidden air force base in the South Pacific. Paper tanning, name on front fly leaf.
Hardcover. Boston, Lothrop Publishing, 1st, 1888, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers stamped in black and gilt. 339 pages, b&w frontis. Bright copy with name on front fly leaf.