Moby Dick is considered to be one of the Great American Novels and a treasure of world literature. Written by Herman Melvile The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by the mad Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab has one purpose on this voyage: to seek out a specific whale “Moby Dick”, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off his leg, which now drives Ahab to take his revenge.

Approached in 1926 by publisher R. R. Donnelley to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast, Kent suggested Moby Dick instead. Published in 1930 by the Lakeside Press of Chicago, the three volume limited edition filled with Kent’s haunting black and white drawings sold out immediately. Random House produced this trade edition which was also immensely popular. A previously obscure book, the success of the Rockwell Kent illustrated edition was a factor in its becoming recognized as a modern classic.

Description: Hard bound, no dust jacket. First Rockwell Kent trade edition, first printing. Bound in black boards with silver lettering and picture of breaching whale on front. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent with woodcuts throughout the text, with full-page plates, chapter head- and tailpieces, other smaller cuts in the text. Wear to boards with edges and corners threadbare. Minor staining to page edges. Front hinge cracked, but holding well. This edition has been credited with contributing greatly to the rediscovery of Moby Dick as a modern classic – Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory # 29408

$95

Moby Dick
Melvile, Herman

Title: Moby Dick
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1930
Binding: Hardcover
Illustrator: Kent, Rockwell
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: First Thus

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions, Recent Acquisitions ·

Anias Nin, feminist icon, diarist, model and dancer is probably one of the finest writers of female erotica of the last century. Known for her elegant and sensual style, she has the ability to convey the most intimate of thoughts in a way that we can almost feel. Winter of Artifice, a trio of novellas, the second work of fiction by Nin, was first published by the Obelisk Press in Paris during the summer of 1939. Shortly after the book’s publication, her publisher, Jack Kahane died, and World War II broke out. Nin moved to New York; taking a few copies of the book with her. Knowing censorship laws would prevent her from issuing an unexpurgated version in America, she deleted one of the stories and revised the other two. Still unable to find a publisher, she acquired a used printing press, and, with the help of Gonzalo Moré, her current companion and lover, she produced the book herself. Although Nin would later publish a few books, written by herself and some friends, under the name of the Gemor Press, this title was the first she produced, and, like much that happened in those early years of the Second World War, more an accident of fate than an intentional act. Accordingly, there is no publication information.

Description: Hard bound with printed boards. Limited edition of 500 printed copies self published by the author. No dust Jacket, as issued. The colophon states: “The present edition is limited to five hundred copies. It has been set by hand and printed by the author in Spartan type of twelve points on Copper Plate paper.” Line engravings by Ian Hugo.  Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory #28966

$250

Winter Of Artifice
Anais Nin,

Publisher: Self Published
Publication Date: 1942
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No dust jacket, as issued
Edition: 1st U.S. Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions, Recent Acquisitions ·

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was an American author and aviator. Gift from the Sea was written by Lindbergh, while on vacation on Florida’s Captiva Island in the early 1950s. Written in an essay-style, with shells on the beach for inspiration, Lindbergh reflects on the lives of  American women of the mid-twentieth century. With great wisdom and insight Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth & age; love & marriage; peace, solitude and contentment during her visit. Gift from the Sea has sold over 3 million copies and has been translated into 45 languages. Ground-breaking for it’s time, it stands today as a seminal work of inspirational literature.

Description: TRUE FIRST EDITION. Hard bound with dust jacket. Beige boards with decorative shells, blue cloth spine with white lettering. Meets points of issue – $2.75 price, beige boards, no additional printings listed on copyright page, author photo to rear of dust jacket. Some wear to edges and corners of boards. Minor soiling to dust jacket that shows a few small tears and chips, now in protective Brodart cover. Foxing to page edges and end pages, otherwise with interior clean and binding sound. A scarce first printing of this modern inspirational classic and perennial bestseller!

Bookseller inventory # 28519

Gift From The Sea
Lindbergh, Anne Morrow

$300

Publisher: Pantheon
Publication Date: 1955
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions, Recent Acquisitions ·

Erich Maria Remarque was a German author best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. His was born on July 22, 1898, in Osnabrück, Germany, the only son of a bookbinder. The family was poor and moved at least eleven times during Remarque’s childhood. During World War I he was drafted into the army. While recovering in a German hospital from wounds suffered during the war, Remarque worked on his first novel. Like many other authors of his generation the horrors of World War would permanently alter his viewpoint. Around this time he switched to the original French spelling of his last name. The immense success of the landmark anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929 established Remarque as an author. This novel helped define a new genre of antiwar & anti-military fiction that grew rapidly in Germany in the late 1920s. The pacifism in his work and their strong sense of sadness & suffering made them very unpopular with the Nazi government, who subsequently banned his work in 1933. In 1938, in fact, Remarque was stripped of his German citizenship. Remarque arrived in the United States in 1939, and later became an American citizen.  Arc de Triomphe (1946), the story of a German refugee doctor in Paris, France, just before World War II, returned Remarque’s name to the best-seller lists. Remaque’s heartfelt indignation about human suffering made him a spokeman against fascism in all forms. His literary career opened the door of world of  Hollywood, where he worked briefly. His numerous lovers included Marlene Dietrich & Natasha Paley Wilson. He counted among his friends Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, and many other Hollywood stars of the day.

Description: INSCRIBED BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE on the front free end page “With all good wishes, Erich Maria Remarque – New York, 27 January 1946″. Hard bound, no dust jacket. Wear to blue cloth boards that show sunning and age toning to spine edge. Hinges weak, but holding well. interior clean. Previous owners book plate affixed to front fixed end page, otherwise very good. Translated from the German by Walter Sorell and Denver Lindley. Published in 1945, Arch of Triumph is a about stateless refugees  life in Paris before World War II. It was the second book of his, after All Quiet on the Western Front, to appear on bestseller lists worldwide. It was made into a feature film in 1948. A RARE signed copy!

Bookseller Inventory# 28710

Arch of Triumph
Remarque, Erich Maria

$500

Title: Arch of Triumph
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Publisher: D. Appleton – Century Co., New York
Publication Date: 1945
Binding: Blue Cloth HC + Gilt Lettering
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Dj
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions, Recent Acquisitions, Signed & Inscribed ·

Patrick Leigh Fermor widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest travel writers. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE (1915–2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier. A BBC journalist once described him as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.” He played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. For a year and a half Leigh Fermor, disguised as a Cretan shepherd endured a perilous existence, living in freezing mountain caves while spying on German troops. In April of 1944, dressed as German police corporal, he stopped the car belonging to General Karl Kreipe, the island’s commander. The chauffeur disposed of, Leigh Fermor donned the general’s hat and, with his accomplice Moss driving the car, they bluffed their way through 22 checkpoints. The General meanwhile, was hidden under the back seat. For three weeks the group evaded German search parties. Hunted by German patrols, the group moved across the mountains to reach the southern side of the island, where a British Motor Launch was to pick them up. Eventually, on 14 May 1944, they were picked up and transferred to Egypt with their prisioner. Patrick Leigh Fermor was awarded a military OBE in 1943 and was appointed a Companion of Literature in 1991. He received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List, 2004.

Fermor  lived partly in Greece—in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive grove in the Mani. Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece—stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past. His books His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. Celebrated not only for his books but for his wartime exploits, He is, perhaps, the last of a breed of writer-travelers whose reputation has an aura of genuine action and courage.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. First edition stated. Wear to dust jacket that shows sunning to spine edge. Some edge wear to blue cloth boards, otherwise with interior clean and binding sound. Scarce! Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli takes the reader among Sarakatsan shepherds, the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora. Roumeli is not on modern maps: it is the ancient name for the lands from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth.

Bookseller Inventory# 28626

$175

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece
Fermor, Patrick Leigh

Publisher: Harper & Row, Publishers, New York
Publication Date: 1966
Edition:First U.S. Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Literary First Editions, Recent Acquisitions ·

Humes was a co-founder of The Paris Review in 1953, along with Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. He studied writing with Archibald MacLeish at Harvard, graduating in 1954. A Scientist, novelist, activist, inventor, filmmaker, architect, prophet, healer, madman, Harold “Doc” Humes was, by all accounts, an exhilarating, infuriating and terrifyingly brilliant man. He participated in Leary’s LSD experiments and later continued his own experiments, guiding the first LSD experiences of several famous literary friends. He reinvented himself as a “guru on campus”, a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. First printing of this now cult-classic title set during a build-up to an inevitable war, in which the US Navy assigns an all black crew to work under three white officers on an insanely dangerous munitions base located on a tiny Caribbean island. Wear and tanning to dust jacket edges. Previous owners stamp to front free end page, otherwise very good. A scarce copy from a legendary forgotten novelist!

Bookseller Inventory # 23011

$225

Men Die
Humes, H.L.

Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1959
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions ·

In 2003 Hilary Thayer Hamann self published an ambitious coming of age novel that went on to become an underground classic. Anthropology Of An American Girl, Hamann’s breakout first novel explores the sexual and intellectual awakening of a young American woman struggling to remain true to herself.  At it’s core it is a moving depiction of first love, following Eveline Auerbach from her high school years in East Hampton, through her early adulthood in the high-pressured Manhattan of the 1980s. Now revised and reissued by Spiegel & Grau, it has gone on to rave reviews, and is a current best seller.

Description: SIGNED BY H. T. HAMANN on the front free end page. TRUE FIRST EDITION of the now classic novel. Hard bound with dust jacket. Stated First edition with # line 10-1. Published September, 2003. Green cloth with gilt title to spine edge. Rare first state with “E”  for “Eveline” stamped in gold foil to front board. Very minor edge wear to dust jacket, otherwise fine.

Bookseller Inventory# 23071

$150

Anthropology of an American Girl
Haman, Hilary Thayer

Publisher: Vernacular Press
Publication Date: 2003
Binding: Hardbound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions, Signed & Inscribed ·

Woody Allen is an Academy Award winning screenwriter & director, as well as an accomplished  jazz musician, author, actor and playwright. Woody Allen has won three Academy Awards and been nominated a total of 21 times! He has more screenwriting Academy Award nominations than any other writer. Best know for his known for his New York comedies, he as synonymous with Manhattan as yellow cabs and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Stated First Printing. Illustrated with black and white photographs. Front dust jacket flap has 10/67 on bottom right, and $4.50 price to upper edge. Bound in beige backed blue cloth bound boards. Woody Allen’s first published book, a play. Boards bright and clean. Some minor edge wear and age toning to dust jacket, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 26993

$150

Don’t Drink The Water
Allen, Woody

Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1967
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions, Recent Acquisitions ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. First printing of the First U.K. edition. Some wear and minor foxing to dust jacket. Previous owners small Spanish language stamp affixed to front free end page. Slight foxing to page edges, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 24246

$100

The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Steinbeck, John

Publisher: Heinemann
Publication Date: 1958
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Edition: First U. K. Edition

· Category: Literary First Editions ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Foreword by Thomas Mann. Previous owners name to front fixed endpage. Some wear and minor chipping to dust jacket, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 20522

$100

Demian
Hesse, Herman

Publisher: Henry Holt
Publication Date: 1948
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First U. S. Edition

· Category: Literary First Editions ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Stated first printing. Black boards with yellow title on spine edge. Some minor wear to dust jacket, otherwise very good. A fictional account of the author’s time spent as a fire lookout near Arches National Monument, and loosely based on Carol Turner who disappeared into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Many friends of Abbey have claimed the author called Black Sun his favorite work.

Bookseller Inventory # 24280

$120

Black Sun
Abbey, Edward

Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: 1971
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Literary First Editions ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Blue cloth over boards with red/gold titles. Red top stain. Dust jacket with tipped in author photo, as issued. Wear and minor sunning to edges of boards. Some soiling to page edges, and foxing to endpages. Dust jacket shows some tanning, with one small red stain to rear pannel. Interior pages clean and binding tight.  Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory # 23013

$300

The Unpossessed
Slesinger, Tess

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 1934
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Literary First Editions ·

$350

· Category: Literary First Editions, Signed & Inscribed ·