Rare Finds – A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“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.

“The Sonnets from the Portuguese… are the deepest and at times the darkest thoughts of a woman of genius, in grave health, who finds in middle life not the death she waits for but the love she never expected” (Markus, 13).

When Elizabeth Barrett met Robert Browning she was a widely read and critically esteemed poet who has already published her collected Poems in two volumes. She was also suffering from a mysterious, debilitating illness that confined her to her rooms and believed that death was imminent.

Inspired by Browning, she wrote a sequence of 44 sonnets, a private and personal expression of her thrill at finding love and her despair of its seeming impossibility. For five years she showed these poems, arguably the finest she had ever written, to no one, not even to Robert, not even after he became her husband.

Finally in 1849, her health much improved by a move to Italy, and with her husband going through his own period of despair, she pushed the sheaf of papers under his arm and rushed from the room. “When Robert saw them he was much touched & pleased,” she wrote later. “Thinking highly of the poetry he could not consent, he said, that they should be lost to my volumes [the second edition of her Poems that was to come out the following year] & so we agreed to slip them in under some sort of veil.”

Robert had always associated Elizabeth with the Portuguese Catarina of her poem “Catarina to Camoens.” They decided on the ambiguous title Sonnets from the Portuguese, implying that they were a work of translation, and placed them directly after “Catarina to Camoens” in the 1850 second edition of her Poems, the first time they appeared in print. We are pleased to offer an excellent copy of this important second edition.

“Emily Dickinson now stands with Walt Whitman as one of America’s two preeminent poets of the 19th century and perhaps of our whole literary tradition” (ANB).

Dickinson published only 11 poems during her lifetime, and even these were published anonymously and likely without her consent. She wrote steadily, however, circulating poems among family and friends and cultivating friendships with other writers. One such friend, Helen Hunt Jackson, volunteered to serve as her literary executor, telling her, “you are such a great poet – and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.”

After Emily’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered a locked box containing a trove of 1,775 manuscript poems. She enlisted Mabel Todd to edit and publish a volume of these poems in 1890. The response was so positive and the demand so overwhelming that 11 editions were run off in the next year, along with a Second Series of poems in 1891, followed by a Third Series in 1896.

Dickinson’s poems are her “letter to the world,’ records of the life about her, of tiny ecstacies set in motion by mutations of the seasons or by home and garden incidents, of candid insights into her own states of conciousness, and of speculations on the timeless mysteries of love and death. Her mind was charged with paradox” (Hart, 108-9).

The first edition of the first volume of Dickinson’s poems is particularly rare, as only 500 copies were printed. The Second and Third Series are also quite scarce: only 960 copies of the Second and 1000 copies of the Third were published. We are pleased to offer first editions, first printings of all three volumes, a landmark in American poetry.

 

“A compassionate President Lincoln revokes the dismissal of General McClellan’s aide-de-camp.”

Charles Frederick Havelock (1803-68) was a British Army officer who had served with distinction in India and Afghanistan before coming to America and volunteering his experience and expertise on behalf of the Union Army. On December 23, 1861, Lincoln nominated him to be aide-de-camp to Major General George McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac, with the rank of Colonel.

In April 1863, Col. Havelock was mustered out of the service, about which he wrote to Lincoln, who responded in writing to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton: “Hon. Sec. Of War: My Dear Sir: Col. Charles F. Havelock has been mustered out of our service, as I suppose, in strict accordance with law, and the routine of the Department. With an imperfect understanding of this, he is deeply mortified by us, whose cause, I think, he had made some sacrifices to try and serve. Considering who he is, how he came here, and the apparently abrupt, and, to Eurpoeans, unusual mode of his dismissal, I think the order of dismissal as to him, better be revoked – allowing him his pay. If a reason is asked, place it on the ground of my order. Yours truly, A. Lincoln.”

Havelock was reinstated, and this fine letter serves well as an exceptional example of Lincoln’s compassion as President. We are pleased to offer this letter, penned entirely by Lincoln and signed by him.