Islands in the Sky

Philadelphia, Toronto : The John C. Winston Company, [1952]

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE of one of Clarke's earliest works. A near fine copy in the original dust jacket; moderate wear at spine ends, lightly soiled, rubbed. Overall a very appealing copy.

$475

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The Paramount Book of Blues

First Edition. 16mo. Original Wrappers. 40p., 6.25x9.25 inches, 30 blues songs with musical transcriptions and lyrics, 6 photos of the artists with short biographical sketches. A fine copy in original stapled pictorial wraps.

$500

Goodbye, Columbus

ARTHUR MIZENER'S REVIEW COPY OF PHILIP ROTH'S MASTERFUL FIRST BOOK. WITH ANNOTATIONS BY MIZENER. "The real novelty of Roth's view of American Jewish Life, circa 1959, was its absence of any sense of tragedy or oppression... Hurling themselves into the American Dream, the Patimkins live a continuous daily round of sports... and of eating–gargantuan meals, served by Carlota, the maid, that smother conversation in active digestion and extra helpings." –Claudia Roth Pierpoint, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books "Professor Mizener's best-selling biography of Fitzgerald, ''The Far Side of Paradise,'' was published in 1951 by Houghton Mifflin, a decade after a heart attack ended the downward-spiraling career of the canonizer of the Jazz Age of the 1920's."–NY Times obituary, Feb. 15, 1988. Octavo. Original cloth, original dust jacket. Review slip laid in. Bookplate of Arthur Mizener. Neat pencil annotations by Mizener throughout. Spine toned with small chip at head and light edgewear. Custom leather box. An impressive copy. RARE.

$5,500

The Old Man and the Sea

FIRST EDITION of Hemingway's Pulitzer-Prize winning classic; a magnificent copy.Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature on the strength of The Old Man and the Sea, being cited "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".Octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket; custom cloth box. A fine, exceptionally bright copy.

$5,000

Wait Until Spring, Bandini

FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED on the front endpaper. "For Miss Fowler, who taught me all about radio, –– with all good luck / John Fante" Octavo, original cloth, dust jacket. An excellent copy in a superb dust jacket with only minor toning to rear panel.

$5,000

Letters of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia

First edition, first state with "T.E.L." at p. 495 and "Baltic" at p. 182. With16 photographs and illustrations including 4 maps of which two are folding. Octavo. Original fawn polished buckram in publishers original dust jacket. A fine copy.

$495

Photographs 1970-1990

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ."I hate the word 'celebrity.' I've always been more interested in what people do than who they are, and I hope that my photographs reflect that. I have the opportunity to work with people who are the best actors, and writers, and athletes, and dancers--a broad spectrum. I feel like I'm photographing people who matter, in one way or another. I'm photographing my time."–Annie Leibovitz, in an interview with Literal MagazineFolio, original photo-pictorial boards, original glassine. Minor tears at extremities of rear glassine wrapper. A lovely copy.

En attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot]

First edition SIGNED BY SAMUEL BECKETT. Octavo, original wrappers; custom half-leather box. Text in French. Some browning and rubbing to spine.

$20,000

Howl and Other Poems

SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY ALLEN GINSBERG, WITH SUNFLOWER DRAWING. A later printing of Ginsberg's masterpiece. "In October 1955 Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem ['Howl'] in public for the first time to tumultuous applause at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco with the local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald the reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they labeled the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Book Store and the City Lights publishing house in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?' Later Ginsberg wrote that 'in publishing 'Howl,' I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy' (Original Draft Facsimile Howl, p. xii). Very nearly fine with only the most trivial wear to extremities.

$450

Death of a Salesman

FIRST EDITION of Arthur Miller's masterpiece. A very good copy in the original cloth and the original dust jacket. Jacket with light wear at spine, extremities. Overall a very attractive copy of this landmark work.

$1,450

A Dictionary of the English Language

The sixth edition and first (authorized) quarto edition. The text is based on Johnson's revised fourth edition of 1773. “The [1785] quarto is set in three columns, with rather heavy column rules. The original folio design is followed, except that all the illustrative quotations are set in small type, and the differentiation of verse from prose quotations by the use of a deeper indent is not observed... the 1785 design combines clarity with relative compactness.” –Paul Luna, Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s Dictionary Two volumes. Quarto, contemporary tree calf expertly rebacked preserving the original spine; spine elaborately gilt (in six compartments with red and black leather labels), marbled endpapers. Some foxing to portrait and title of volume I, some occasional spotting, generally clean.

$2,500

The Bluest Eye

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED on front free endpaper: "To John / Love, gratitude - all of that. / Toni / 11.5.70". Inscribed to and from the library of John A. Williams, with his signed card laid-in. The recipient, John Alfred Williams, is a noted African-American writer and academic. Octavo, original half-cloth over boards, original dust jacket.; custom half-morocco box. Book fine, some toning to edges and spine of dust jacket. An outstanding inscribed association copy of the rare first edition.

$7,200

Hudibras. The First and Second Parts

FIRST COMBINED EDITION. "Its distinctive octosyllabic couplets and MOCK-HEROIC style gave rise to the term 'Hudibrastics'. It was immensely popular in its time for its satire (partly inspired by Cervantes and Rabelais) against Puratinism and the tyranny of the Commonwealth." – The Cambridge Guide to Literature in EnglishOctavo. Perfunctory calf binding, title remargined at inner hinge, cropped somewhat close at top of text block, scattered early and elegant marginal annotations in ink. A sound copy.

$250

Clarke, Arthur C