Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“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 had 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 Peace Prize for Literature in 1953. Search our current selection.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” - Abraham Lincoln

Running as a little-known candidate for the Illinois senatorship in 1858, Lincoln challenged incumbent and Democratic leader Stephen Douglas to a series of debates. Douglas had been responsible for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which contained a provision that the question of slavery should be decided by the territorial settlers themselves. In contrast to Douglas’ “popular Sovereignty” stance, Lincoln held that the United States could not survive as half-slave and half-free states.

The result was a memorable chain of lively arguments in front of cheering crowds. In the seventh and final debate, Lincoln cast the struggle to do away with slavery as the “struggle between two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time…. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’”

Though Lincoln lost the senatorial race, he assiduously compiled and preserved the texts of the debates himself and had them published in advance of the presidential election of 1860, during which he defeated a split Democratic party. Browse our Lincoln selection.

“When people envision Jerusalem, very often what they envision is Jerusalem painted by David Roberts.”

Out of the romance of napoleon’s ill-fated 198 adventure in Egypt and Lord Byron’s Eastern travels, memorialized in his exotic poetry came a fascination for the Near East. It was a fascination that touched Scotsman David Roberts, the leading landscape painter of his day. The appetite of the Victorian book-buying public for views of the mysterious East, still relatively unseen by Western eyes, set Roberts inexorably on the course that would determine his immortality. As a member of the Royal Academy of Arts Roberts was given unfettered access to the tombs, temples, monuments and ruins of Egypt, Syria and the Holy Land.

Tinted in color and published a few short years before the advent of photography, these images permanently fixed in the popular imagination such sites as the great Sphinx of Giza and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We offer an exceptional first quarto edition of Roberts’s Holy Land, three volumes in beautiful publisher’s morocco-gilt.

“It is a woman’s writing, but whose?” - (William Thackery on Jane Eyre)

The pseudonymous publication of Jane Eyre by “Currer Bell” sparked one of the great literary controversies of 1847. The novel proved an immediate and almost unprecedented success, selling out within three months while the public clamored for any information on the identity of its mysterious author.

Speculation was rampant in contemporary papers, with reviewers attributing the book to a man because of the quality and complexity of the prose. However, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte’s literary hero and later an important member of her circle, wrote, “It is a fine book… I have been exceedingly moved & pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a woman’s writing, but whose?”

Bronte’s identity was revealed only after the work had gone through several editions and had been accepted as an English literary classic. View our current selection.

“When you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” - Sir Raymond Priestly

Shackleton’s Own Copy:
In 1907, Shackleton commanded the Nimrod expedition, which “reached within 97 miles of the South Pole (almost four years before Amundsen and Scott achieved the Pole itself)… discovered the Polar Plateau and accomplished the first attainment of the Magnetic South Pole, as well as the first ascent of Mt. Erebus - fully outdistancing his predecessors to a degree unequalled in the history of polar exploration” (Books on Ice).

Knighted by Edward VII, who considered the expedition “the greatest geographical event of his reign” (Huntford), Shackleton quickly published his classic account, The Heart of the Antarctic. Only 300 copies of the Special Limited Large Paper Issue were published, in two thick quarto volumes bound in original vellum-gilt.

We offer an exceedingly rare association copy of the deluxe edition, this copy belonging to Shackleton himself, with his bookplates and additional autograph material, and also including the wonderfully illustrated Antarctic Book, issued only with this Limited Edition and signed by every expedition member, including Shackleton. View our current Shackleton selection.

“This is the prose that I have been working for all my life…” - Ernest Hemingway

While working on this, his last major novel, Hemingway wrote to Scribner, “This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit. It is as good prose as I can write as of now” (Letters, 738).

Santiago’s epic battle with the marlin and the sharks won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was instrumental as well in his 1954 Nobel Prize. Though one of his most popular, The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most difficult of his books to find signed or inscribed, as he had become increasingly reclusive in his later years.

Faulkner, who reviewed the novel for the magazine Shenandoah, called it Hemingway’s best. “Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us. I mean his and my contemporaries” (Baker, 593-94).

We offer a first edition, in the first-issue dust jacket, inscribed and signed by Hemingway.

“A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.” - Mark Twain

Critics blasted Twain’s dark, brilliant Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the moment it was published, attacking the book for its “coarseness” and “blood-curdling humor.” Nonetheless, it emerged as arguably the defining novel of American literature, prompting Hemingway to declare: “All modern writing comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had. There was nothing before. There has been nothing since.”

The first edition of Huck, published in 1885, was a labor of love and frustration that took Twain eight years, and he was devastated that its publication failed to elicit the same enthusiasm as his beloved Tom Sawyer. Browse our site for inventory.

“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 Matthew 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 1916 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 offer a selection of fine first and second editions of this vital and indespensable photographic history.

“And yet it still moves.” - Attributed to Galileo after being forced to recant the Copernican theory before the Inquisition.

That Galileo would publish one of the most controversial books of his time was unexpected. An esteemed scientist, he obeyed the edict of the Church in 1616 to stop defending Copernicus’ theory of the sun-centred system, and he began the writing of the Dialogo with the sanction of the Pope, who anticipated a balanced, theoretical debate on the issue.

Instead, nearly 70 years old, aged and infirm, Galileo came down firmly, defiantly and triumphantly on the side of Copernicus and reason with the publication of his Diagolo in 1632. It was a dangerous book, written in the language of the masses and clearly illustrated with drawings that any layman could comprehend.

The book immediately sold out, and despite the best efforts of the Church to suppress it - it remained on the Index of Prohibited Books for nearly 200 years - it flourished on the black market and ignited the world. We offer an exceptional 1632 first edition of Galileo’s Diagolo, in a 17th-century vellum binding.

“Everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” - John Steinbeck, regarding East of Eden.

Well before he had published his early masterpieces Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wanted to write a book about his family and California. Whether it would ultimately become an autobiographical novel or a novelistic family history, this project remained fixed in his mind for years as the big book that he would someday write.

After a decade of less experimental works and distractions, Steinbeck finally sat down to the story of the Hamilton and Trask families and the Salinas Valley he knew so well. “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my art or craft or profession in all these years,” he wrote. “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

The story of Cain and Abel provided a thematic framework for his own story, and in copying out Chapter 4 of Genesis in preparation for a chapter of his own, Steinbeck came across his title: East of Eden.

This novel was first issued in a signed limited edition of 1500 copies, 750 of which were reserved for private distribution by the author and publisher. We are pleased to offer a copy from this signed limited edition, with the original slipcase, signed by Steinbeck.