(JOYCE, James)
8vo, original printed wrappers. Small chip from rear wrapper, front wrapper lightly creased, otherwise a fine copy, with two copies of the publication announcement, preserved in a folding board box. Small chip from rear wrapper, front wrapper lightly creased, otherwise a fine copy, with two copies of the publication announcement, preserved in a folding board box First edition. One of 96 numbered copies printed on Arches paper. Our Exagmination contains brief quotations from Work In Progress, including a passage concerning Swift and blindness which was not later incorporated in Finnegans Wake. The âLetters of Protest' are reputed to have been written by Joyce himself. Slocum & Cahoon B10. Also includes Samuel Beckett's first appearance in print, his essay on Joyce entitled "Dante, Bruno, Vico, Joyce." The present copy belonged to Mogens Boisen, the Danish translator of Ulysses, and is inscribed to him by Sylvia Beach. It also includes two letters from him to a former owner, explaining the circumstances whereby he was given the book.
PLATH, Sylvia
8vo, original green cloth, dust jacket. Signs of use, but a very good copy in worn and soiled dust jacket. Signs of use, but a very good copy in worn and soiled dust jacket First edition of Plath's first regularly published book. Presentation copy, inscribed by Plath on the front free endpaper: "For Luke & Cynthia / with love - / Sylvia / April 13, 1961." A highly important association copy, rich in personal interest and history: E. Lucas (Luke) Myers, an aspiring writer from Tennessee, was intimately connected to Ted Hughes and Plath. Plath met Luke Myers at Cambridge, where she and Myers were studying, and admired his poetry and fiction. In her journal entry for February 25, 1956, she wrote: "I have learned something from E. Lucas Meyers (sic) although he does not know me and will never know I've learned it. His poetry is great, big, moving through technique and discipline to master it and bend it supple to his will. There is a brilliant joy, there, too, almost of an athlete, running, using all the divine flexions of his muscles in the act. Luke writes alone, much. He is serious about it; he does not talk much about it. This is the way." - Sylvia Plath, The Journals (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p. 207. On March 3, Plath commented on Myers' fiction: "A chapter - story from Luke's novel arrived, badly typed, no margins, scrawled corrections, & badly proofread. But the droll humor, the atmosphere of London & country which seeps indefinably in through the indirect statement: all this is delicate & fine. The incidents & intrigues are something I could never dream up . . . Nothing so dull & obvious & central as love or sex or hate: but deft, oblique. As always, coming unexpectedly upon the good work of a friend or acquaintance, I itch to emulate, to sequester." - Plath, The Journals, p. 344. Luke Myers was a close friend of Ted Hughes, and it was outside the chicken coop behind the rectory of St. Botolph's Church that Myers rented from Mrs. Helen Hitchcock, the widow of a former rector, that Hughes used to pitch his tent on weekend visits to Cambridge University, from which he had graduated a year and a half before. St. Botolph's rectory "was a poets' haven, anarchic and unjudgmental", with Mrs. Hitchcock "turning a blind eye to the capers, bibilous and otherwise, of her undergraduate lodgers, of whom she was very fond." - Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (London: Viking Penguin, 1989), p. 73. In February, 1956, a group of young Cambridge poets including Luke Myers, Ted Hughes, Daniel Huws and David Ross, among others, had just put together a little magazine appropriately named the St. Botolph's Review after Luke Myers' digs where they often gathered, and the launch party for the magazine (of which only one issue was published) was to be the occasion for the first fateful meeting between Plath and Hughes on Saturday, February 25, 1956. Plath, who had read some of the poetry by the St. Botolph's group - and two of whose own poems had been criticized recently by one of them, Daniel Huws, in the student magazine Chequer - purchased a copy of the Review on the morning of the party, and memorized several of Hughes's poems in anticipation of attending the party and meeting him. According to Plath's journal entry, after dancing for a while with a drunken, "satanic" Luke Myers, she ran into Hughes. Amid the crush of the party, "I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: âmost dear unscratchable diamond' and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, âYou like?' and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room . . . And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, . . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face." - Sylvia Plath, The Journals, pp. 211-212. As Diane Middlebrook put it: "Ted Hughes may not have been looking for a wife that night, but Sylvia Plath was looking for a husband, and Ted Hughes met her specifications exactly." - Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage (London: Viking, 2003), p. 5. A month later in London, Hughes, not wanting "to declare his interest . . . asked Lucas Myers to play go-between. Myers could meet Plath for a drink somewhere, then just drop in on Hughes at the flat on Rugby Street, as if by chance. Myers admits in his memoir that he had taken a dislike to Plath, and that he agreed to this ploy reluctantly. He duly invited Plath to join him and Michael Boddy, another of Hughes's friends, at a pub called the Lamb, in Conduit Street - a poets' hangout - and shortly afterward suggested a visit to Hughes. It didn't take long to see that Hughes and Plath wanted to be alone." Later that night, at Plath's hotel, they spent - in Plath's words - a "sleepless holocaust night" together. - Middlebrook, p. 24. Soon after, Hughes left the job he had in London and moved to Cambridge, sharing a flat with Myers in Tenison Road, meeting Plath every day, and abruptly marrying her on Bloomsday, June 16, 1956 - secretly, with Plath's mother, Aurelia, the only family member at the wedding. In later years, Myers was witness to the difficulties in the marriage, and aware of its tenuous nature. In a measured attempt to explain "Sylvia's behavior and volte-faces between pleasantness and bitchiness" to Olwyn Hughes in a letter dated March 12, 1960, Myers wrote: "I have the feeling that it is best to think of Sylvia as being always pretty much as she was this weekend . . . Ted suffers a good deal more than he would ever indicate or admit, but he
MERWIN, W. S.
Oblong folio, illustrated, accordion-fold, original handmade paper folders. A very fine copy of this extraordinary production. A very fine copy of this extraordinary production First separate edition of this long poem which was originally published in Travels (N. Y.: Knopf, 1992), printed accordion-fold, so that when fully extended, the text is fifteen feet long. Limited to 160 copies printed from "hand-set Samson Uncial type on kakishibu, a persimmon-washed handmade paper" from the Fuji Mills Cooperative in Tokushima, Japan, illustrated with the image of an undulating river printed from photopolymer plates in five colors, the whole enclosed in layers of folders of handmade paper, the penultimate layer printed with Athanasius Kircher's 1665 map of the world, the first to show the world's currents, with the outermost layer/folder made of a "loft-dried raw flax sheet", signed by Merwin.
DANTE
Small folio, quarter black calf & red silk over boards, slipcase, by Claudia Cohen. A handsome book, as new. First edition, deluxe issue. Limited to 125 copies signed by each of the translators & with an original etching signed by Francesco Clemente laid in. The translators include Heaney, Strand, Halpern, Kinnell, Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, Richard Howard, Stanley Plumly, C. K. Williams, Alfred Corn, Robert Haas, Sharon Olds, & Cynthia Macdonald. The text was set in Monotype Dante & printed letterpress by Michael & Winifred Bixler on Rives heavyweight paper.
HUGHES, Langston
Tall 4to, 13 pages, stapled. Top edge of cover partially sunned, jagged tear at bottom of one page, otherwise a very good copy. Extremely rare: one copy (Emory) noted in OCLC. Top edge of cover partially sunned, jagged tear at bottom of one page, otherwise a very good copy. Extremely rare: one copy (Emory) noted in OCLC First edition, consisting of a two-page printed leaflet with the above title and the imprint "Reprinted From the CLA Bulletin, Official Publication of the College Language Association, Volume VII,Number 2, 1951, following by ten pages of typescript on carbon paper, of which nine pages comprise poems and the title-page reading "8 Poems For Children by Langston Hughes". Presentation copy, inscribed twice by Hughes,first on the College Language Association leaflet "To Harry Ray - Sincerely, Langston Hughes" and then on the typed title-page "For Harry Ray - Sincerely - Langston Hughes, April, 1954." It may be that Ray stapled these two pieces together.
HAMADY, Walter
Small square 4to, original vellum-backed boards with printed label by Peter Franck. Very slight foxing to covers, otherwise a fine copy of one of the rarest Perishable Press publications. Very slight foxing to covers, otherwise a fine copy of one of the rarest Perishable Press publications First edition of the fourth book from the Perishable Press. One of only thirty copies, of which only twenty-four were reportedly bound, signed by the poet and artist. Hamady 4. Apart from the title-page and the colophon, which were the only parts of the book that were printed, the text was handwritten and then printed by hand on a scraper-bar lithography press using a variety of shades of yellow, green and red, at the Crambrook Academy of Artl. Six & Six is the first use of a hand lithograph press.