TRAVEL. EXPLORE. DREAM.
“I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.” —Captain James Cook
Homer dreamt of travel—and Odysseus set out across the sea. Lewis and Clark explored a continent—with well-thumbed books in their pockets. Mark Twain saw hope in a nation’s restless genius and swept Huck out into the swift currents of the Mississippi. Ernest Shackleton braved frozen worlds in a testimony to the human spirit. These stories are recorded for all time in the pages of great books. They are the legacy of those who dared to dream.
Join the adventure. Let us at Bauman Rare Books help you to build a collection of exceptional and valued books that will let you see into the past and dream of the future. Browse our current Rare Book Travel inventory.
Tags: cook first editions, rare travel books, travel book collection
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No need for X-ray glasses from Q’s laboratory to see the value of Ian Fleming’s phenomenally successful James Bond books.
An officer in His Majesty’s Secret Service during World War II, Fleming burst onto the literary scene in 1953 with the first in his series of spy novels, thrilling readers for over fifty years.
007 is the ultimate man of action, his high-stakes missions propelling him to exotic locales where he seduces exceptional (and exceptionally named) women. He bests some of literature’s most sinister masterminds and he does it all mixing glamour and grit, subterfuge and style.
The first editions of Bond’s adventures, like diamonds, are forever. And you don’t have to be richer than Goldfinger to start a collection. Call or visit us today to begin building a library whose value will never be shaken—but whose contents will surely leave you stirred. Browse our current Fleming selection.
Tags: ian fleming, james bond rare books
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“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
—Winston Churchill
Some have led us into battle; others have guided nations and empires through their births, in their darkest hours, or to their greatest moments. And some have led by example, whether by persevering through adversity in the Antarctic or by quietly defying injustice on a Montgomery bus. Their courage has inspired us; their ideas have changed history.
Now it’s up to you to help pass on their legacies. Build a collection around the leaders who most inspire you. Our expert staff can help you to rediscover their courageous voices, captured in books and documents that will last for generations.
The items listed in our mini catalogue represent just a small selection of our offerings. Download our catalogue to begin building a valuable and enduring monument to history’s finest men and women: your own library.
Tags: leaders, presidents, rare books, rare finds
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“This mammoth work is a necessary part
of any Civil War library” (Eicher).
“Zealous in their work, often regardless of danger, and at all times handicapped by the vexing difficulties of the photographic process of that day,” pioneering photographer Mathew Brady and his assistants created an unprecedented photographic record of war, capturing “scenes of actual conflict, others of places devastated by gunfire, of troops on the march or in bivouac, and of individual officers and men” (DAB).
The photographers depicted the soldiers and their leaders, the forts, the camps, the marches, the battlefields where the Blue met the Gray… and the horrendous aftermaths. In 1911 Francis Trevelyan Miller’s renowned Photographic History of the Civil War brought together over a thousand of Brady’s dramatic images—many previously unpublished—in ten large quarto volumes, with contributions from distinguished historians as well as veterans of both Confederate and Union forces. We have in our collection a fine first edition of this vital and indispensable photographic history. Browse our current inventory.
Tags: civil war, photographic history, trevelyan miller
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“Politics is a jungle” —John F. Kennedy,
in his notes for Profiles in Courage
On an August night in 1943, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s patrol boat PT-109 was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and burst into flames. Badly wounded, Kennedy saved a fellow crewman in a rescue that earned him a Purple Heart and the Navy and Marine Corp Medal “for extremely heroic conduct.” A decade later Kennedy spent six months recuperating from surgery for a spinal injury suffered that night. Strapped to a board and immobilized, Kennedy turned to history for perspective on that test he had survived and, most importantly, for a guide to the challenges he faced as a newly elected senator. As Arthur Schlesinger recalled in A Thousand Days, “it was the tension between means and ends which fascinated and bothered Kennedy… Profiles in Courage represented his most sustained attempt to penetrate the moral dilemmas of the political
life.” In his notes for the book, Kennedy observed: “Politics is a jungle.”
In Profiles in Courage Kennedy looks at eight American senators, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Sam Houston, whose lives provide a path through the challenges of political life and toward America’s future. Here is Kennedy’s tribute to those who best inspire faith in “the cause of principle… that is the basis of all human morality.” We are pleased to offer a rare inscribed copy of Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the scarce original dust jacket and housed in a custom clamshell. Browse our current selection.
Tags: john f kennedy, profiles in courage
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“I will leave judgements on this matter to history – but I will be one of the historians.” – Winston Churchill
“In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.” Churchill penned his monumental six-volume History of the Second World War only a few years after the war’s end, including in it details privy only to him as Prime Minister, and offering his singular observations and memories of the people and events that shaped the course of history.
While he has published a number of books prior to the war, this was the work that would seal his literary reputation. Published separately from 1948-1954, the six volumes in Churchill’s masterpiece achieved immediate popularity in both Britain and the United States and earned Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. We offer a fine six-volume set of first editions, handsomely bound in morocco-gilt. Browse our current inventory.
Tags: first edition, rare book, second world war, winston churchill
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“One of these mornin’s you’s gonna rise up singin’.”
George Gershwin had wanted to write an opera about the African-American experience long before he read DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy in 1926. But in Heyward’s portrayal of life on “Catfish Row”—based on the very real Cabbage Row in Heyward’s hometown of Charleston—Gershwin recognized his material. He immediately wrote to Heyward to suggest a joint project. Heyward agreed to the proposal, but both he and Gershwin were busy with other projects and the two men delayed their collaboration.
In 1934 Gershwin finally began work on the opera. When Porgy and Bess premiered in 1935, it was not successful, but it was controversial. Some questioned the use of African-American dialect and even Gershwin’s use of the opera form was criticized as being unconvincing and too “popular.” In the end, Gershwin and Heyward both lost money on the project. It was not until years after Gershwin’s death that the opera became popular with audiences, and it was decades before it finally received acceptance within the opera world. Today, Porgy and Bess represents the best that American opera has to offer.
We offer a deluxe limited edition of the piano-vocal score, signed on the limitation page by George and Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Rouben Mamoulian, who produced the premiere. This copy is additionally inscribed and signed again by both George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. Because of Gershwin’s tragic early death in 1937, inscribed copies of any of his works are exceedingly rare. View our current Porgy and Bess inventory.
Tags: gershwin, Inscribed, porgy and bess, rare book
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“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” (Constitution, Article II).
A reluctant if inevitable choice for the presidency, George Washington had hoped he might find some way to decline. After his brilliant leadership, however, any successor’s road to the nation’s highest office seemed as unsteady as America’s place in history. With the course of a presidential election eloquently described by Jefferson as a “bloodless revolution,” America’s leaders stand at the center of its very identity—even if, as Abigail Adams wisely pointed out, their election comes after the course of a “whole year” in which its citizens seem to hear “nothing else but abuse and scandal.”
As America prepares to choose its next president, Bauman Rare Books is especially privileged to offer this select group of important presidential books, speeches, treaties, correspondence, photographs and more. In the words of Lincoln, Madison, Grant, Reagan, Kennedy, Truman, Jackson, Clinton, FDR, Carter, Nixon, Wilson, Monroe and others—found in these exceptional items—we find confirmation of the ongoing strengths and difficult choices of America’s leaders, as well as affirmation of the “bloodless revolution” that continues to steadfastly author our future. Browse our inventory.
Tags: presidential rare books
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Why collect children’s classics? There is the familiarity of a beloved book that impressed us in our earliest years, the images that stir our recognition, the words and phrases that resonate in our memories. We carry so many of those first-loved, often best-loved books with us for a lifetime, and when we choose to approach them as a collector would, a fascinating world opens up.
Often not printed in large quantities, these first editions survived more perilous paths than many other books, as they usually ended up in children’s hands, where they were read, carried, dropped, drawn upon, tossed, clutched and loved.
These first editions have survived the vagaries of time because they were treasured, and in collecting them, we keep them safe for yet another generation. There is a tremendous pleasure in devoting one’s time, focus and energy to collecting such wonderful classics, and we invite you, in the books that follow, to rediscover the books you loved in your earliest years.
Tags: antiques, gift childrens books, rare childrens books. childrens first editions
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“Flashes Of Genius By An Expert In Self-Destruction”
In 1925 Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby to immediate critical acclaim and popular success. Eight years later, he was no closer to delivering another novel. His editor at Scribner’s, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, worried about Fitzgerald but never lost faith, writing to him in August of 1933, “Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them; but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time.”
Circumstances, indeed: in the intervening years the country plunged into the Great Depression, his wife Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and had to enter a sanitarium for long-term care, and Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism and the difficulty of ever surmounting his own reputation following the near-miraculous Gatsby. “The man who started the novel,” he remarked after publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934, “is not the man who finished it.” Reception was mixed and while the novel sold well for the Depression era, Fitzgerald had hoped for so much more.
It was the last novel he would publish in his lifetime, perhaps the final solid step before the dissolution that would so closely parallel the tragic decline of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Browse our current inventory.
Tags: f scott fitzgerald, first edition, signed edition, tender is the night
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