Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“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.

In 1819 34-year-old John James Audubon found himself unemployed, homeless and in jail for unpaid debts. He had failed as a merchant and as an investor, his wife Lucy was expecting their second child and he had no job prospects. He declared bankrupcy and the sheriff took everything except the clothes his wore, his gun - and the portfolio of drawings of birds he had made over the years, as these were assumed to have no value. It was then that Audubon, encouraged by his wife, decided to make his lifelong passion and hobby his life’s work.

After raising enough money through painting portraits, giving drawing lessons, and even a brief stint as a taxidermist, he set off down the Ohio River with the ambitious goal of painting an example of every type of bird on the continent. He did not have a publisher, he did not have a wealthy patron or governmental support: he had only his gun, his drawing kit, his passion and his unswerving faith in his talent. When he couldn’t find a publisher in Philadelphia or New York, he traveled to England and Scotland, finally bringing out his series of 435 magnificent double-elephant folio plates depicting over 1000 individual birds with the firm of Robert Havell in London.

The exceptionally rare folio edition consistently sets records for the price of a book when one appears on the market. The royal octavo editions reproduced Audubon’s lovely paintings at a more manageable scale in seven volumes. The octavo editions improved on the folio by grouping the birds by species and devoting a separate plate to every species; Audubon also incorporated a few new species discovered in the West since the folio publication. We offer a royal octavo edition published by the New York firm of Lockwood and Son, seven volumes in handsome publisher’s blind-tooled morocco, complete with 500 superb hand-colored plates.

“Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Paradise Lost, Book 1.

The tremendously difficult circumstances under which Milton produced Paradise Lost are legendary. Already blind and recently widowed for the second time when Charles II was restored to the throne by Cromwell and his unwavering support of the Commonwealth. After a brief imprisonment, Milton retired from public service and devoted himself  wholly to the composition of his epic. His blindness forced him to dictate the 10,000 lines of blank verse to various amanuenses, including two of his daughters. When Milton approached publisher Samuel Simmons in 1667, he found that Simmons was reluctant to sponsor the work because the publisher believed that this unprecedented genre would not be popular with readers. Finally, Simmons reluctantly agreed to print a small first edition of 1300 copies, for which Milton earned only 10 pounds.

Considered one of the greatest works in the English language, Paradise Lost has infuenced such diverse works as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. We offer a 1669 first edition of Milton’s masterpiece, handsomely bound in full contempory calf.

“It was a great idea to bring them together; celebrities of the same generation, of similar virtuosity” - Monroe Wheeler.

George Macy’s decision to commission Henri Matisse to illustrate Ulysses was a bold move for his fledgling Limited Editions Club in 1935. Scandal still swirled around James Joyce’s masterpiece, which had been banned in the United States until 1933. Of course Matisse was a world-renowned painter, but in preliminary conversations with Macy he confessed to not having read Ulysses; Macy provided him with a French translation.

“The very next morning, M. Matisse reported that he had read the book, that he understood its eighteen episodes to be parodies of similar episodes in the Odyssey, that he would like to give point to this fact by making his illustrations of the original episodes in Homer!” (Macy). Matisse created 26 beautiful full-page illustrations, including six soft-ground etchings - his only use of that particular medium.

Macy had planned for 1500 copies of the work to be produced and signed by both author and illustrator. Matisse signed all 1500, but legend has it that when Joyce realized that Matisse had been working from Homer’s Odyssey rather than his novel, he refused to sign any more than the 250 or so that he had already signed - making double-signed copies of this lavish illustrated edition very scarce.

We offer a beautiful copy of this collaboration between two of the 20th-century’s finest artists, one of the great modern illustrated books, signed by both author and illustrator.

First Impressions/Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen began writing a long epistolary novel under the title First Impressions in October 1796. She had previously written stories, but this was her first attempt at a sustained piece of serious fiction. She finished in August of the following year.

That fall, her father inquired at the leading London publishers, Cadell & Davies, as to whether they would be interested in seeing the manuscript, but they declined. Without documentary evidence, it is hard to gague how the twenty-two-year-old Austen took the news. On one hand, she immediately plunged into a new version of her story “Elinor and Marianne,” the work that would ultimately become Sense and Sensibility. On the other, she made no attempt to publish anything for another fourteen years.

While she continued writing stories, reading them aloud to friends and family, it was not until her family settled on her brother’s property that Austen returned to the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. The sophisticated, seasoned author - now in her mid-thirties - set about perfecting the novel that in her naiive enthusiasm she had penned at twenty. (She had called the revision process “lopping and chopping.”)

The new title she chose still reflects the impressions that Elizabeth and Darcy make on each other at their first meeting; her first sentence - “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” - is itself universally  acknowledged as one of the greatest beginnings of world literature.

Pride and Prejudice remains Austen’s most popular, most widely translated and most frequently adapted novel, the work that most often gives readers their own first impressions of her wonderfully imagined and exquisitely detailed world. We offer a very rare first edition - one of only 1500 or so copies printed.

“One of the great events in the annals of learning” - Samuel Johnson.

At twenty-five, fresh from the success of his mock-heroic poem “The Rape of the Lock,” Alexander Pope proposed and began taking subscriptions for a new translation of Homer’s Iliad. With Jonathan Swift and other’s campaigning on his behalf, the response was overwhelming; Pope’s Homer became a national event, affording Pope financial independence at a time when most poets relied on patronage and permanently establishing his literary reputation.

Publisher Bernard Lintot rose to the occasion, producing from 1715-1720 six very finely printed quarto volumes, embellishing Pope’s heroic couplets with engraved headpieces, initals and illustrations. Pope’s detailed “observations” on each of the twenty-four books, along with his introductory Essay on Homer, reveal the care that the splendid poet dedicated to the “most laborious task of his life.”

All the more amazing, then, that this man with little formal education, who largely taught himself Ancient Greek, could pen the translation that Dr. Johnson judged “one of the great events in the annals of learning,” and that Coleridge called “an astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity.”

In 1725-1726, Pope translated Homer’s Odyssey, which Lintot likewise printed in five lovely quarto volumes uniform with the Iliad. We offer first editions of the six volumes of the Iliad, together with first editions of the five volumes of the Odyssey - altogether eleven magnificent large quarto volumes - sumptuously bound in beautiful period-style elaborately gilt-decorated red morocco.

Natalie and David Bauman have been in the rare book business since 1973. Bauman Rare Books is one of the nation’s largest and best-known rare and antiquarian book sellers, with two locations, one in New York City on Madison Avenue and the other in Center City Philadelphia.

Rare Finds offers individuals interested in Rare Books, whether you are starting your collecting or adding to it, we offer some additional insight into the antiquarian book world. We’re updating once a week for the rest of the year so stop by or add us to your RSS reader.