García Marquez, Gabriel
Signed limited first English edition of García Marquez's ode to the persistence of romantic memory. Gorgeously designed edition of the author's acclaimed novel, first published in Spanish in 1985. The English translation was praised by Thomas Pynchon to the utmost reaches of superlative adjectives, and was the recipient of less frenzied but still glowing compliments from Michiko Kakutani. García Marquez's theme - romantic love that never fades, vows never broken; or, seen another way, the nightmare impossibility of permanently dismissing a determined suitor - struck Pynchon as "revolutionary," though his judgment that working in "love's vernacular" is a "daring step for any writer" may raise eyebrows among those familiar with genres and modes of writing in which these themes and treatments have never fallen out of fashion. García Marquez himself once said, with perhaps greater perception, that the revolutionary part of writing consists simply of doing it well: and he did. A beautiful copy of this signed limited US edition, which preceded the UK edition by several months. 9.25'' x 6.25''. Original quarter pink cloth with black cloth boards, gilt-stamped spine. In original decorative black lace-printed mylar protective jacket. With original yellow and black slipcase. Bright pink endpapers, fore-edge machine deckle. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. [10], 348, [4] pages. Signed by Garcia Marquez at colophon and numbered 107 of 350 signed and numbered copies of the first edition. Bright, sharp, clean, and tight overall. Fine in fine jacket and slipcase.
Holbein, Hans; Thomas Frognall Dibdin
Attractive Victorian-era book reproducing Holbein's images as wood engravings for two of his popular series. Holbein's Dance of Death, designed in the 1520s and first printed from Lutzelberger's woodblocks in 1538, enjoyed decades of sustained popularity among the morbid Protestants of northern Europe, with the theme's popularity only increasing as waves of imitators produced their own editions and copies. His Bible cuts, first printed in the same year, were allegedly an effort on the part of the publisher to commit to print images of "subjects connected with holy writ" rather than the more lascivious images of classical Goddesses, that would "only injure the mind by error, or poison it by depravity" (Dibdin). A lovely edition of Victorian antiquarianism. 7'' x 4.5''. Full contemporary red goatskin ruled and ornamented in gilt, raised bands. Blind-tooled dentelles, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. Illustrated in black and white. DANCE OF DEATH with dissertation by Francis Douce. Text in English with additional content in Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. xii, 475, [1] pages. Some light edgewear, moreso to joints, spine slightly toned. Touch of foxing to endpapers, faint creasing to first couple leaves. Shows well.
Parmigianino; Béguin, Sylvie; Di Giampaolo, Mario; Vaccaro, Mary
First edition of this in depth study of the Italian Old Master with full page reproductions of his Mannerist work on various high quality paper stocks - including paintings, murals, and frescos. 12.75'' x 9.25''. Original light blue boards. In original color pictorial dust jacket, (no price, as issued). Light blue endpapers. Illustrated throughout in color and in black-and-white. 297, [3] pages. Jacket with light edgewear, tiny bit of rubbing. Book with minor shelfwear, small spot to rear pastedown. Interior fresh.
Stein, Gertrude
First edition of Stein's masterpiece of modernism - stories of three working-class Baltimorean women, written under the influence of Flaubert and Cezanne. By the time her first book was completed, Stein was well educated, well-traveled, and well connected in the art world, sitting for a Picasso portrait in 1906 even as she composed THREE LIVES with self-consciously painterly technique. Though retrospectively classed as one of her most accessible works, the book was difficult for contemporaries, none of whom consented to publish it without being paid, and even the vanity press she settled on was hesitant to accept Stein's money without trying to correct her "pretty bad slips in grammar" (Beal). "I want to say frankly that I think you have written a very peculiar book and it will be hard thing to make people take it seriously," wrote Grafton publisher Frederick Hitchcock, who hadn't seen anything yet. In later years James Weldon Johnson acknowledged "Melanchtha" as perhaps the first instance of a white author writing a "story of love" between Black characters with humanity and dignity; not to be outdone in praise for her own works by anyone, Stein herself called it "the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature." Of THREE LIVES as a whole, "it would perhaps be enough to state that it is a masterpiece" (Carl Van Vechten). A lovely copy, difficult to find in collectible condition. 7.25'' x 5''. Original gilt-lettered blue cloth. No dust jacket as issued. 279, [1] pages. Light edgewear to boards and fore-edge, minor soil to top edge of text block. Hinges starting. Spine lightly sunned.
Forster, E.M.
First US edition of Forster's classic discussion of the English-language novel, based on a series of lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. What is a novel about? -Oh, about 50,000 words. Subject to adjustment for inflation, Forster's answer to the eternal question still stands as one of the better ones. As Virginia Woolf so rightly said in response to ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL, the novel is a subject about which nobody knows anything, but Forster is perceptive, lucid, and intelligent whether in error or out of it. ASPECTS includes Forster's famous distinction between story and plot as well as his great and resolutely anti-historical vision of all novelists at work in a great circular room, the living and the dead alike suspended out of time, concerned not with the "demon of chronology" but with the stifling, airless spaces of the human heart. 7.25'' x 5''. Original maroon cloth. In original tan dust jacket. 250 pages. Light soil to jacket and top edge of text block. Minor chipping and edgewear to jacket; spine toned. Bookseller label to front pastedown. Overall, clean and sound. Near fine in very good plus jacket.
Baldwin, James
First edition of this essay on the Atlanta Child Murders, which a contemporary review at the time called "nothing less than an update on the progress-or lack of it-of the American Dream." Baldwin first began researching the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981 on assignment from Walter Lowe, the first Black editor at PLAYBOY, where an earlier version of this essay was first published and won the magazine's Best Nonfiction award for 1981. Sensitive to his burden of responsibility to victims, survivors, and the truth, Baldwin rejected the creative license employed by Truman Capote and his many lesser true-criminal successors, explaining: "Tolstoy has every right to throw Anna Karenina under the train. [.] But the life of a living human being, no one writes it. You cannot deal with another human being as though he were a fictional creation." Rather, EVIDENCE is a deep examination of the still-unresolved crimes and investigation in the context of the many failures and spoiled promises of a post-Civil-Rights-era South, the broken relations between the police and the Black community of Atlanta, and the fatal corruption of city administrators and the American justice system. 8.25'' x 5.5''. Original quarter black cloth, black paper boards, silver-lettered spine. In original unclipped ($11.95) glossy color typographic dust jacket with photo of Baldwin by J. Phil Samuell on rear panel. Fore-edge machine deckle. xvi, 125, [1] pages. Purple printed review slip, listing publication date as October 28, 1985 and price as $11.95, laid in. Bright, sharp, and sound. b.
Bishop, Elizabeth; Morley, Helena; [Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant]
First edition, in the second-state dust jacket, of Morley (Brant)'s adolescent diary in Bishop's translation from the Portuguese. Alice Deyrell Caldeira Brant began keeping diaries in 1893, the 12-year-old daughter of a diamond miner in the small Brazilian town of Diamantina; their first publication (in Brazil in 1942) was arranged by her husband and edited to omit any and all reference to their meeting and courtship. At the time of Bishop's English translation, the author was 76, happy to meet the poet and expand on her old stories, living proof that "it really happened; everything did take place, day by day, minute by minute, once and only once, just the way Helena says it did" (Bishop). 8.25'' x 5.5''. Original quarter yellow cloth with gray-green decorative boards. In original unclipped ($4.75) dust jacket by Harry Ford, second state, front flap text ending in "Mor-". Photographic endpapers. 281, [1] pages. Light edgewear to boards and jacket, minor soil and scuffing to extremities.
