“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.

George Gershwin had wanted to write an opera about the African-American experience long before he read DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy in 1926. But in Heyward’s portrayal of life on “Catfish Row”—based on the very real Cabbage Row in Heyward’s hometown of Charleston—Gershwin recognized his material. He immediately wrote to Heyward to suggest a joint project. Heyward agreed to the proposal, but both he and Gershwin were busy with other projects and the two men delayed their collaboration.

In 1934 Gershwin finally began work on the opera. When Porgy and Bess premiered in 1935, it was not successful, but it was controversial. Some questioned the use of African-American dialect and even Gershwin’s use of the opera form was criticized as being unconvincing and too “popular.” In the end, Gershwin and Heyward both lost money on the project. It was not until years after Gershwin’s death that the opera became popular with audiences, and it was decades before it finally received acceptance within the opera world. Today, Porgy and Bess represents the best that American opera has to offer.

We offer a deluxe limited edition of the piano-vocal score, signed on the limitation page by George and Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Rouben Mamoulian, who produced the premiere. This copy is additionally inscribed and signed again by both George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. Because of Gershwin’s tragic early death in 1937, inscribed copies of any of his works are exceedingly rare. View our current Porgy and Bess inventory.

“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.