Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“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.

“We ain’t gonna die out. People is going’ on - changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”

In November 1933, a vast dust cloud rose over an area stretching from Texas to the Great Plains, the beginnings of an ecological disaster that would blacken the sky all the way to Chicago. Over the next five years, the Dust Bowl forced thousands of Americans to hit the road in search of work. John Steinbeck reported first-hand on the bleak conditions in the California migrant camps and resolved to write a “big book” chronicling the ordeal of the displaced and disenfranchised.

That book was The Grapes of Wrath, his most celebrated and controversial novel, a national bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. “It is a long novel, the longest that Steinbeck has written, and yet reads as if it had been composed in a flash… Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart” (Books of the Century, 118).

The recipient of this copy, playwright Paul Osborn, would go on to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.

We offer a beautiful presentation copy of the April 1939 first issue of The Grapes of Wrath, in the original dust jacket, boldly inscribed to Paul Osborn with an original drawing of a bird by Steinbeck.

“When Douglas invites any people, willing to have slavery to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us.” - 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 is 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. We are pleased to offer an exceptional first-issue copy in fine condition.

The story behind the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is now legend in the book world. Charles Dodgson originally handwrote and illustrated a charming story for his child friend Alice Liddell entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Three years later, at the insistence of a friend, Dodgson, using the pen name Lewis Carroll, arranged to publish the manuscript with illustrations by John Tenniel, under the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Two thousand copies of this first edition were printed in May of 1865; Carroll requested fifty advance copies to present to friends. In July, Tenniel complained to Carroll that he was dissatisfied with the printing of the illustrations, and after much debate the two agreed to recall all of the presentation copies that Carroll had sent out, promising replacements from the new printing.

Of the remaining copies from the original press run, one thousand copies were sold to the New York publisher Appleton. Shortly thereafter, Alice was published in America with a new title page. (Only about twenty copies with the London 1865 title page are known today, making it virtually unobtainable.)
Carroll’s brilliant mix of rigorous logic and whimsical fancy, coupled with Tenniel’s illustrations, gave us the first work for children to leave moral education behind, liberating children’s stories from sentimental shackles. Alice was an immediate sensation. The Appleton edition is virtually the earliest unobtainable edition, preceding the first published London edition. We offer a lovely copy of this, the first American edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, unrestored in original cloth.

“Oh Friends, not these tones! Rather let us sing more cheerful and more joyful ones. Joy! Joy!”

Inspired by its Romantic theme of universal brotherhood, Beethoven had the idea of setting Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to music in his early twenties. The young composer’s ambitions were not yet equal to that great work, and his earliest efforts were unsuccessful.

He turned his attention elsewhere and established his reputation in the concert halls of Vienna with the masterpieces of his middle period: the bulk of his symphonies, the most accomplished of his piano sonatas, including the Appassionata, and his only opera, Fidelio. As his star ascended, however, he confronted personal affliction. His deafness continued to worsen, and his love for one woman after another went unrequited.

During these complex years, Beethoven repeatedly returned to Schiller’s Ode. By the 1820’s, his health failing, he again took up the pen, determined to set the poem and recast it in his own light. Beethoven returned to the conducter’s lectern himself, after an absence of several years, to lead the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, his only to make the use of the human voice. After the performance, a by-now completely deaf Beethoven had to be turned around by one of his singers to witness the raturous ovations of the audience.

We offer an original subscriber’s copy of the first edition of the full score of the magnificent Choral Symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth.

“The entire book stands as a testament that man, at least through art, can rise above his condition, can transform misery into beauty, loneliness into solitude.” - Aperture

In 1961, an obscure photographer struggled to have his first book published, a collection of stark, haunting and remarkable photographs that he had taken over a ten-year period. He was turned down by numerous publishers, mainly because of his insistence that the book’s layout - the sequence of photographs, the text that accompanied them - be exactly to his specifications, as he had envisioned it page by page.

It was finally published by a modest firm in Culpepper, Virginia in a small edition that quickly went out of print. Dave Heath’s A Dialogue With Solitude, now considered among the most significant photo books of the century, remains a testament to its creator’s steadfast vision. In the raw beauty of its images, we see with what power a single group of photographers can convey so much, so eloquently.

We invite you to contact us for a copy of our new photography catalogue. Among the offerings, we include the rare first edition of Dave Heath’s A Dialogue With Solitude.