Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“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.

“They have been men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world.” - Preface to Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.

While serving in Paris as a member of Queen Elizabeth I’s embassy to France, Richard Hakluyt repeatedly heard the English derided for their comparitive lack of accomplishment on the sea compared to other nations. But Her Majesty’s Sailing Ships had passed through the Strait of Maggelan, traversed the Pacific, established trade with sultans and czars, and, most triumphantly, circumnavigated the globe under the bold and brazen leadership of Francis Drake.

Determined that England be accorder her rightful place as first among sea-going nations, he undertook what no one had done before: to collect in one book and present to the world the most comprehensive collection of England’s accomplishments of geographical exploration and discovery.

Much was at stake, as the race to claim predominance in the New World was on, and Hakluyt, with his peers Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, worked tirelessly to promote the cause. The inclusion by Hakluyt of hundreds of accounts of discovery by other nations spurred Elizabeth’s ambitions and helped lay the foundations of empire.

“Je vous detache ces quelques hideux feuillets de mon carnet de damne.”

Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French symbolism, scandalized ninteenth-century Paris and London with his passionate, destructive affair with the poet Paul Verlaine. At the age of eighteen, while recovering from gunshot wounds inflicted by his older lover, Rimbaud completed A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer), a lacerating prose poem that would go on to influence generations of artists, from the Surrealists to the Beats to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.

Inspired by Rimbaud’s vision, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe contributed a series of eight dazzling photogravures to accompany the 1986 Limited Editions Club edition of A Season in Hell, among them his iconic horned self-portrait.

We offer a special signed limited edition of these photogravures, one of only 40 tall portfolios produced by Mapplethorpe three years before his death, each of the eight images numbered, initialed and dated by Mapplethorpe.

“After all, tomorrow is another day”

No one could have predicted, when Atlanta housewife Margaret Mitchell broke her ankle in 1926, that such a trivial mishap would give rise to one of the most enduring of American novels. Confined to her home, Mitchell borrowed piles of books from her local library, until her husband told her that she’d have to write a book herself if she were to have anything more to read.

For the next ten years, Mitchell labored in secret over her sweeping Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind, which would become the fastest-selling novel in the history of American publishing and win the Pulitzer Prize. In October 1936, only a few months after Gone with the Wind was published, Mitchell wrote a letter to one of her novel’s many fans: “How nice of you to write me that you were sorry when you came to the end of Gone with the Wind. When I first saw the book, it looked so long and heavy that my heart sank and I wondered if any reader would ever toil through until the end. Thank you so much for all the wonderful things you wrote me about the book - and about myself.”

We offer a May 1936 first printing of Gone with the Wind, signed by Mitchell, in first-issue dust jacket, accompanied by the wonderful personal letter described above from Mitchell regarding the novel.

“Without such characters, there would be less life in literature, and less literature in life” - Harold Bloom.

In 1478, William Caxton, the first English printer, published Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Five years later he printed his second edition from a superior manuscript, and additionally embellished the work with 26 wonderful woodcut illustrations, one for each character. After publication Caxton did not destroy the carved wooden blocks that he had commissioned; rather, they were passed down and sold to subsequent editors, finally coming into the possession of London tailor and antiquarian John Stowe, who used 22 of them to illustrate his important edition of 1561, tangibly linking his edition to Caxton’s virtually unobtainable incunables.

Caxton’s woodcuts provide us with iconic images of these pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser studied Stowe’s edition carefully, and Shakespeare was at least familiar with it. William Blake wrote, “every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage ; we all pass on, each sustaining one of these characters of Chaucer.”

We offer a lovely, complete copy of this splendid 1561 edition, which in addition to the Canterbury Tales includes The Romaunt of the Rose, Troilus and Creseide, Boecius de Consolacione, and The Testament of Love, a folio volume beautifully printed in two columns of gothic text and very handsomely bound by Bedford.