“In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.” Churchill penned his monumental six-volume History of the Second World War only a few years after the war’s end, including in it details privy only to him as Prime Minister, and offering his singular observations and memories of the people and events that shaped the course of history.

While he has published a number of books prior to the war, this was the work that would seal his literary reputation. Published separately from 1948-1954, the six volumes in Churchill’s masterpiece achieved immediate popularity in both Britain and the United States and earned Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. We offer a fine six-volume set of first editions, handsomely bound in morocco-gilt. Browse our current inventory.

In 1925 Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby to immediate critical acclaim and popular success. Eight years later, he was no closer to delivering another novel. His editor at Scribner’s, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, worried about Fitzgerald but never lost faith, writing to him in August of 1933, “Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them; but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time.”

Circumstances, indeed: in the intervening years the country plunged into the Great Depression, his wife Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and had to enter a sanitarium for long-term care, and Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism and the difficulty of ever surmounting his own reputation following the near-miraculous Gatsby. “The man who started the novel,” he remarked after publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934, “is not the man who finished it.” Reception was mixed and while the novel sold well for the Depression era, Fitzgerald had hoped for so much more.

It was the last novel he would publish in his lifetime, perhaps the final solid step before the dissolution that would so closely parallel the tragic decline of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Browse our current inventory.

“Could there be stories without a moral, of human adventure and misadventure? The horrors of the plague provided Boccaccio with the incentive and the opportunity…Boccaccio creates a human panorama of love, courage, cowardice, wit, wisdom, deceit and folly… If he does not teach the art of  living virtuously, he does the ‘art of living well’” (Boorstin, 266-70).

Boccaccio composed his masterpiece sometime between 1348 and 1352, and his realistic – rather than moralistic or allegorical – characters proved enormously influential through the centuries; Shakespeare drew on Boccaccio for Troilus and Cressida, and as many as 54 early English plays derived their plots from the Decameron (Pforzheimer 71).

We are pleased to offer an excellent copy of the first complete edition in English, comprising the 1625 second edition of Volume I together with the 1620 first edition of Volume II – as virtually always found – in lovely 19th-century morocco-gilt. Browse our current selection.

“Passages Of Unearthly Beauty”

Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake in 1922, the same year Ulysses saw publication. Compared to that book, Finnegans Wake “took longer to write… was conceived and executed under a greater range of symbolic and mythic guidelines, was dictated to more famous amanuenses, among them Samuel Beckett, was used as a weapon of revenge by Joyce, who mocked in it the people who had offended him… in short, it was the inscription on the walls of eternity of James Joyce’s feelings, his prejudices and his obsessions” (Arnold, 55).

“Joyce insisted that each word, each sentence had several meanings and that the ‘ideal lecteur’ should devote his lifetime to it, like the Koran” (Connolly, 81).

Seventeen years after Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake, his publishers issued the finished work in a signed limited large-paper edition of only 435 copies for England and the United States. We are pleased to offer one of the 310 copies issued in America, signed by Joyce, complete with the original slipcase, a beautiful copy in fine condition. Browse our current Finnegans Wake selection.

John Adams’ highly contested Discourses on Davila was prompted by Jefferson’s firm declaration of “his faith in reason and democracy… as the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs.” Alarmed by the fresh violence of the French Revolution, Adams disagreed, feeling that “the will of the majority, if out of hand, could lead to ‘horrible ravages’… Adams stressed the perils of unbridled, unbalanced democracy” (McCullough 420-421). (Though published anonymously, Adams was commonly known to be the author.)

We have recently obtained a rare association copy of Adams’ important Discourses from the library of David Humphreys, whose long friendships with Washington, Adams and Jefferson placed him at the center of the dispute surfacing in these pages. The volume is twice signed by Humphreys, who served as Washington’s trusted aide-de-camp during the Revolution and later, in Europe, worked closely with “Franklin, Adams and Jefferson, the old Revolutionary trio” (McCullough, 322). We are pleased to offer this copy, entirely uncut in original boards, with an exceptional association. Browse our current inventory.