Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“The experiences of his five years in the Beagle, how he dealt with them, and what they led to, built up into a process of epoch-making importance in the history of thought.”

The son of a well-to-do country doctor, Darwin finished at Cambridge with an unexceptional record, anticipating only a comfortable position in the clergy. He pursued his interests in geology and natural history essentially as the hobby of an educated parson with plenty of leisure time.

In 1831, shortly after graduating, a letter arrived offering the 23-year-old Darwin an unpaid position as the naturalist on board the HMS Beagle. The proposition came as a complete surprise, and his father initially convinced him to decline. He thought better of his decision, however, and hurried to London to interview with the equally young and decidedly aristocratic Captain Robert Fitzroy, who had taken over command of the Beagle on its previous voyage to South America.

Though they came from substantially different backgrounds, the two formed an immediate friendship, sharing a small cabin during the Beagle’s five-year circumnavigation, from 1831-36. It was on this trip that Darwin first read Lyell’s Principles of Geology, on this trip that he observed the strange flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands, on this trip that he began to form the ideas that would go on to become On The Origin of Species.

In 1839 the four-volume report of the Beagle’s two expeditions appeared; Volume III of the report consisted of the detailed journal Darwin kept during the voyage - the great scientist’s first book. We are pleased to offer an excellent set of the four-volume report, in original cloth and complete with the eight folding maps.

“But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way,
in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest,
a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
- A.A. Milne

Trapped indoors during a rainy holiday in Wales, writer and editor A.A. Milne turned his hand to a series of short verses for children, inspired by his young son Christopher Robin: “There on the side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years….and here within me were unforgettable memories of my own childhood.”

Accompanied by Ernest Shepard’s whimsical line drawings, Milne’s verses were published in 1924 as When We Were Very Young. The success of that book, which introduced the character of “Mr. Edward Bear,” prepared the way for the following three volumes of Milne’s “Pooh Quartet”: Winnie the Pooh, Now We Are Six, and The House at Pooh Corner. We offer a lovely first edition set of all four Pooh books in scarce original dust jackets.

“One of the greatest lithographic works ever printed.”

Out of the romance of Napoleon’s ill-fated 1798 adventure in Egypt and Lord Byron’s Eastern travels, memorialized in his exotic poetry, came a fascination for the Near East and the places of scripture and revelation. It was a fascination that touched Scotsman David Roberts, the leading landscape painter of his day, who had honed his technique and established his reputation as an artist of the scenic and exotic with his sketches of Spain and Morocco, published in the early 1830’s.

But the appetite of the Victorian book-buying public for views of the mysterious East, still relatively unseen by Western eyes, set Roberts 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.

Louis Haghe, the impresario of the new illustration technique of lithography, oversaw the publication in six extraordinary books all the detailed grandeur of 250 of Roberts’s drawings. 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 Robert’s Holy Land, three volumes in beautiful publisher’s morocco-gilt.

“Laid the foundations of Jefferson’s high contemporary reputation as a universal scholar and of his present fame as a pioneer American scientist.”

In 1781, exhausted by the burden of governing war-torn Virginia, stung by criticism of his conduct during Benedict Arnold’s and Charles Cornwallis’ invasions, discouraged by the futility of his own efforts, Jefferson resolved to quit government altogether. His retirement was brief - the death of his wife in 1782 spurned him to retur to congress - but during this time he penned the only book he would ever publish during his lifetime: Notes on the State of Virginia.

Written in the form of answers to a French diplomat’s questions about Virginia, the Notes describe the state’s geography and provide an abundance of supporting material and unusual information. He reluctanctly published the book in 1785 in an edition of only 200 copies while in Paris. A poor translation into French followed in 1786, but it included for the first time Neele’s map of Virginia.

The exceptionally rare first English edition was issued by Stockton in 1787 in an edition of 1000 copies with Neele’s map. The first American edition followed in 1788 but did not include a map. This second American edition contains for the first time the famous color-outlined Samuel Lewis folding map of Virginia, and is the first American edition to include a map.

We offer a copy from this second American edition bound together with an 1800 first edition of Jefferson’s controversial Appendix - in which he presentsthe evidence on which he charged Captain Cresap and his party with the murder in 1774 of peaceable Indians - in contemporary American sheep binding.

“The author was at the height of her powers” - A.S.W. Rosenbach 

Emma was the fourth and last novel which Jane Austen published in her lifetime. “When it was written the author was at the height of her powers, and she write the book rapidly and surely, encouraged by the success of her previous novel to express herself with confidence in the way peculiarly her own” (Rosenbach).

Austen published all her novels analymously, but they nevertheless brought her some fame. In 1815 she visited London to see Emma through the press and to nurse her brother Henry through an illness. The Prince Regent, later George IV, heard of her visit and sent his chaplain, Mr. Clarke, to wait upon her and to give her a tour of the magnificent library at Carlton House.

Through his chaplain the Prince Regent also extended his permission for Austen to dedicate her next novel to him; Emma is her only novel to contain a dedication. “Austen’s self-knowledge, her love of detail…[helped her] to create a proud, self-willed, self-guided, vexing, and outrageous Emma and her greatest novel” (Honan).

We are pleased to offer an excellent copy of the novel many consider to be Austen’s best, one of only 200 copies printed, this copy from the private collection of Scottish peer Hugh Montgomerie, Twelfth Earl of Eglinton, in unrestored original boards and complete with all half titles.

“You are all a lost generation.” - Gertrude Stein, in conversation.

In 1975, noted Hemingway scholar Lawrence Broer interviewed Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Mowrer, for an article in the Lost Generation Journal. During the course of teh interview, she described The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first and perhaps greatest novel as “my book” - she is not only the dedicatee, but also “had been Hemingway’s constant companion during perhaps the most important formative years of his career.”

At the end of a long afternoon of reminiscing over the years they spent in Paris and their trips throughout Europe, Mowrer presented Broer with a wonderful gift: her own personal copy of The Sun Also Rises. She inscribed it to him, “Best wishes, from one who saw the Sun Also Rise. Sincerely Hadley R. Mowrer.”

We are pleased to offer this first-issue copy, Hadley’s own and wonderfully inscribed by her, without the exceptionally scarce original dust jacket.

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” - The Old Man and the Sea. 

While working of 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 being awarded the 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 of 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 are pleased to offer a fine copy, inscribed by the author, “very gratefully, Ernest Hemingway,” in an exceptional original dust jacket.

 

“Once upon a time there were four rabbits…” - Beatrix Potter.

In 1893 a young Beatrix Potter, on holiday with her parents in Scotland, composed a “picture letter” to cheer the child of her former governess, ill with rheumatic fever. “My dear Noel,” she began, “I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits, whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter.”

Some years later, Potter revised Noel’s story into The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Rejected by six publishers, an undaunted Potter printed the first two editions of Peter Rabbit at her own expense, and those privately printed copies - together only 450 copies - sold out immediately.

Publisher Frederick Warne agreed to print a one-shilling trade edition of Peter Rabbit, featuring the unforgettable full-color illustrations which would make Peter Rabbit one of the most popular of all children’s books. We offer a lovely first trade edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, one of the earliest issues in the very scarce brown paper boards.

“I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then…show signs of life and stir…” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

On a stormy June evening in 1816, 19-year-old Mary Shelley was in Geneva with her husband Percy, her step-sister Claire Clairmont, Claire’s lover Lord Byron and Byron’s physician John Polidori. As the evening progressed, the group’s discussion turned to the supernatural. Byron challenged each member of the party to write a tale.

In the days that followed, Polidori and Byron both produced vampire stories and Mary Shelley conceived the story that would become Frankenstein. As she noted in her introduction to the 1831 third edition of the novel, “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me…I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, shoe signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion…He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his [creator's] bedside…”

Anonymously published in London in 1818, Frankenstein initially received unfavorable reviews, but by the publication of the first American edition in 1833, Frankenstein had garnered both popular and critical acclaim.

Now widely regarded as the first science fiction novel, a defining model of the gothic style and a horror masterpiece, Frankenstein was Mary’s first published work. We are pleased to offer the scarce 1833 first American edition of Frankenstein.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness…”

In February 1820, one year before his death at 25, Keats wrote in a letter to Fanny Brawne, “I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have loved the principle and beauty in all things.” Nine days before his death, Keats requested that his gravestone bear the lament, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Despite Keats’ concern that his poetry would not endure, never had so brief a literary career left so lasting a mark. His first volume, Poems, which appeared in 1817, was an uneven miscellany of shorter verse, punctuated by flashes of brilliance.

Keats then turned to the writing of his allegorical “poetic romance,” Endymion. Of it, he wrote: “In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby became better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.”

Keats found himself as a poet in the writing of Endymion, and the themes of his great final odes are prefigured in that poem’s celebrated first line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” We offer a beautiful first edition of Keats’ Endymion, a wide-margined copy bound in full morocco.