Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 426 pages. How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcovers in dust jackets, two volume set reproducing the 1783 first edition. Edited and introduced by Harold F. Harding. "The Lectures went through at least 130 editions between 1783 and 1911. Because of its size and cost, the two-volume work invariably was abridged or issued as cheap one-volume reprints. No other edition available today combines the readability and beauty of the first Edinburgh edition, which is here faithfully and completely reproduced, so that scholars may have access to it again." (dust jacket copy). 496, 550 pages plus index. Clean set, some toning to dust jackets.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 512 pages, mild shelf wear. INSCRIBED BY BRODSKY on the front flyleaf with a little sketch of a sailboat. Dust jacket with light edgewear, closed teat on rear panel.
Hardcover. New York , Clarkson N. Potter, Inc, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 216 pages, b&w illustrations. Dust jacket with slightly faded spine and small tear to uper edge of front cover. Previous owner's bookplate on front end paper. Clean, tight copy. "This collection of fifteen original essays, written especially for this occasion by distinguished Carrollian authorities from around the world, including Morton Cohen, Roger Henkle, Donald Rackin, Jean Gattegno, and Edward Guiliano, celebrates the many aspects of Carroll's life and art."
Hardcover. East Aurora, New York, The Roycrofters, 1st, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 164 pages, portraits of the author and subjects in the book with tissue guards. Embossed Half leather binding and decorated pages. Gilt top edge. Author's signature (in plate) on frontispiece portrait. Number 18 in The Little Journeys Series. A very handsome book.
Hardcover. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 2nd pr., 1947, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in light tan cloth with red lettering to the spine, 361 pages. Although the life of London runs like a thread through the whole fabric of this book, it is not essentially a book about London. Life in Bloomsbury is but the center of a large circle, the point around which the rest of the book revolves, the origin of a disarming commentary on an infinite variety of topics - on Bloomsbury's squares, on the picturesqueness of London a generation ago, on what is true Cockney, on the differences of English and American humor, on the decay of English wit, on books and authors and publishers and the Press, on the literary lions of the past, on the religion of speed, on the charm of Americans, on how the Victorian age was neither so repressed nor so hidebound as most people today like to believe - and so on, one thing leading to another, like good conversation at a good luncheon overlooking the mellow squares of Bloomsbury. The book is full, too, of good stories and reminiscences, both humorous and pathetic, but there is shrewd comment besides on the deficiencies of contemporary society, not the less effective because the author knows how to soften the blow. Mild soil, sunning to covers, clean copy.
Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 153 pages. SIGNED BY KOOSER on title page. Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska.
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."
Softcover. Bennington VT, Bennington College, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in green stapled wrappers. No. 628 of 1,000 numbered copies. Published in the Bennington Chapbooks in Literature series & in memory of William Trot. A speech delivered by Malamud at Bennington College as Lecture Seven in the Belitt Lectureship Series, October 30th, 1984. Introduction by Nicholas Delbanco. Illustrated with 3 full-page black & white photos of Malamud. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with light tape repairs, 318 pages. Stated First Edition. No markings.
Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.
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. London , B. Blake, 1st Thus, 1837, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 848 pages. Hardcover. Marbled edges and endpapers. Raised bands on spine. Clipping of a silhouette of Edward Gibbon pasted on to front end paper. Previous owners notes in pencil on front endpapers. Wear to covers, especially corners. Rubbing. Chipping at spine. Clean, unmarked text.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 897 pages. John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and - in a concluding section, 'Personal Matters' - paragraphs on himself and his work. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 421 pages. A selection of vintage Hellman profiles, interspersed with certain shorter masterpieces of humor that have a quality all their own. Brilliant series of studies of extraordinary people: publisher Alfred A. Knopf, the Countess Mara of cravat-creating fame; the architect Le Corbusier, Alexander Calder, designer Norman Bel Geddes, and many more. Dust jacket rubbed, spine faded. Clean copy.
Softcover. Ithaca NY, State University of New York , 2nd pr., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 350 pages. The contributors discuss the current debate about what philosophy is, how it works, and how Nietzsche's thought clarifies or complicates its understanding. They represent a wide range of views and practices, some aggressively postmodern in their approach, some profoundly skeptical about postmodernism. Although the issue of postmodernism is the central focus, the essays also touch on many other areas of interest to readers of Nietzsche. Spine faded, light pencil underlining to a few pages.
Hardcover. Nashville TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 271 pages. The first English translation of the last work of Gogol to be published during his lifetime. The only important nonfiction prose work of the Russian novelist, the*e thirty-two critical essays, written in the form of personal letters, define Gogol's views on religion, morality, and aesthetics and provide a key to the underlying motives and messages of his earlier fiction, including Dead Souls and The Inspector General. Translated from the Russian by Jesse Zeldin.
Softcover. San Francisco, City Lights, 6th pr., 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 255 pages. A compilation of Charles Bukowski's underground articles from his column "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" appears here in book form. Bukowski's reasoning for self-describing himself as a 'dirty old man' rings true in this book. "People come to my door?too many of them really?and knock to tell me Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk . . . . drink half the night. A long distance operator from Newburgh, N.Y. sends me money. She wants me to give up drinking beer and to eat well. I hear from a madman who calls himself 'King Arthur' and lives on Vine Street in Hollywood and wants to help me write my column. A doctor comes to my door: 'I read your column and think I can help you. I used to be a psychiatrist.' I send him away . . .""Bukowski writes like a latter-day Celine, a wise fool talking straight from the gut about the futility and beauty of life . . ." ?Publishers Weekly. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.
Hardcover. Colbyville, Vt., Silver Print Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 162 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. B&w photography throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.
Softcover. Chicago, Henry Regnery, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 323 pages. "Occasions and Protests offers a collection of articles, protests, and affirmations written over the last thirty years by one of the most astute, eloquent, and concerned observers ever to happen the upon the American scene." The perpetual conflict between the individual and the system is his subject. Clean, bright copy.