CHANDLER Raymond
The Big Sleep
1939
- $7,632
First edition. 8vo. Original orange cloth, spine and front cover lettered in black, in restored dust jacket. New York, Knopf. A very good copy, in a sympathetically restored dust jacket. Dust jacket expertly repaired, more visible from the verso, largely to the top and tail of the spine, and tips. A touch of wear to the extremities of the boards, and some offsetting to the endpapers.
More from Maggs Bros. Ltd
Blues for Mister Charlie
First UK edition. 8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket. London, Michael Joseph. The second play by the great African American writer and civil wrights activist, originally published in America in the previous year. Spotting to top edge, otherwise internally clean, jacket slightly worn with a few tiny nicks to extremities, spine panel toned, withal a very good copy. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
First edition, first printing. 8vo. xii, [2], 318 pp. Original red cloth, spine lettered in blue, dust jacket (internally clean and unmarked; some light wear to extremities of jacket, small amount of very faint marking to front and rear panels, otherwise an excellent copy). LaSalle, Illinois, Open Court. Signed and dated by the author to the title page in the year of publication. A collection of essays on public policy published the year before Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize 'for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy'. De Profundis
First edition, one of 200 copies printed on large paper. 8vo., original white cloth gilt after Charles Ricketts. T.e.g., others uncut. London, Methuen and Co. Very good, top edge of upper and lower covers very slightly rubbed and discoloured where a stain has been professionally cleaned, slight offsetting to front endpapers, internally bright and clean. Attractive bookplate of Cecil Frank Raphael to upper pastedown. The Magnificent A1 Clipper Ship Florence Nightingale
Lithographed card measuring 210 by 135mm. A little spotted and abraded, closed vertical crack & some edge-wear. [New York,] Nesbitt & Co., Printers, c. Commanded by Capt. E.W. Holmes, this Canadian-built clipper, sailed between New York and San Francisco catering to the demand for people eager to join the last years of the California Gold Rush. Of the Florence Nightingale, the card states that ?her passages are among the shortest on record.? While Florence Nightingale was already active as a nurse and health-care reformer prior to the outbreak of the Crimean War, her efforts to improve the conditions of soldiers in Scutari and her subsequent appearance at the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, brought her international renown. She was among the most famous of the women after whom clipper ships were named. OCLC locates a single copy held at AAS. Fairburn IV, p. 2322. View of the Dardanelles. Town of Chanak Kalipi – Asiatic Turkey
WRENCH William H. Watercolour and pencil on paper, measuring 254 by 354mm. A little dusty and a few tiny stains, colour remains bright. Captioned in pencil to an old mount from which the watercolour has become detached. ?Town of Chanak Kalipi - Asiatic Turkey?, n.d. but A slightly naive but charming watercolour looking out across the Dardanelles from the Asiatic side. Painted by the British diplomat William H. Wrench, it appears to show Çanakkale bathed in evening light, framed by a foreground scene of men traversing a path leading down to the town. Wrench served at the British Embassy in Constantinople (Istanbul) for the last three decades of the nineteenth century, firstly as Vice-Consul, then Acting Consul-General. We cannot locate any other examples of his work.- $601
- $601
Caligula and Cross Purpose
CAMUS Albert Translated by Stuart Gilbert. First edition in English. 8vo. Original grey cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket. London, Hamish Hamilton. Faint partial offsetting to endpapers, otherwise internally clean, jacket rather dust-marked with light wear to extremities, spine panel toned, still a good copy overall.- $69
- $69
Original photograph of Constitutionalists occupying the Ottoman Embassy during the Persian Revolution
IRAN. ; UNIDENTIFIED PHOTOGRAPHER Original albumen photograph, measuring 120 by 170mm, mounted on decorative board, Farsi caption stating 'Ottoman Embassy' to verso. Some very minor fading to the photograph, board slightly bowed and dust-soiled. N.p., n.d., but [Tehran, 1328 AH, A remarkable group portrait of Constitutionalists, massed together in the Ottoman Embassy during the final year of the Persian Revolution. The Ottoman Embassy in Tehran became a familiar refuge throughout the Constitutional movement's struggle to wrest power from the Shah. Whenever the Shah used force to crack down on public protest, usually in the form of the well-trained Cossack Brigade, it was one of the few safe places for Constitutionalists to hide and regather. We have encountered this image before, reproduced in Iranian books on the Revolution, but never as an original print. It is a slightly cropped version of the complete photograph, with excellent tones and detail.- $481
- $481
Recueil des lettres patentes, edits et declarations du Roy, lesquels ont été registrez en la Cour de Parlement de Roüen, & ce depuis l’année 1660 jusqu’à present
LOUIS XIV. ; COLBERT Jean-Baptiste. First edition. Woodcut Royal French coat-of-arms on the title and various woodcut initial, head and tailpieces thoughout. Small 4to. Contemporary speckled calf, spine elaborately gilt, extremities a little worn but very good. 643, [1], [7 index], [1]pp. Rouen, De l'Imprimerie d'Eustache Viret, Rare and important: this collections of patents, edicts and royal decrees, includes the foundations of the French Atlantic triangle with decrees establishing both the French West India Company (Compagnie des Indes occidentales) and the Company of Senegal (Compagnie du Sénégal). The work of these two companies facilitated the establishment of plantations, staffed by enslaved labour, on both Saint-Domingue, which the French colonised in 1665, and Louisiana, settled in 1682. The brainchild of both companies was Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), First Minister of State, under Louis XIV from 1680 until his death. He ran a campaign to centralize the French economy, as can be determined from several decrees in the present collection which run up to his death in 1683. The French West India Company (1664-1674) was a privileged association endowed with the monopoly, granted by Colbert, of the exploitation of the African and American domains of the kingdom of France. However, it was replaced in 1673 by the Compagnie du Sénégal because it was considered too focused on the development of tobacco and perceived by the planters as a brake on the development of sugar in the West Indies, which relied more heavily on enslaved labourers. The Compagnie du Sénégal was intended to deliver more enslaved workers to the American plantations. With the establishment of these two companies the French slave trade gathered pace quickly, and just two years later, the first Code Noir was issued. In addition this work includes the founding decree for the East India Company (Compagnie des Indes orientales), the Edict of Nantes, as well as Colbert's 1669 edict for the Eaux et Forêts. Rare: OCLC locates copies at BnF, Lille, Poitiers, Sachsische Landesbibliothek, and Columbia.- $9,540
- $9,540
The Laws of Life, with special reference to the Physical Education of Girls
BLACKWELL Dr. Elizabeth Second edition. 8vo. Publisher's plum cloth, rebacked in roan, spine gilt, ex-library copy, bookplate to front pastedown, some spotting & toning, extremities worn. [viii], [9]-180pp. New York, A. O. Moore, Agricultural Book Publisher, A very good copy of Blackwell's first book, which she describes as ?the first fruits of her medical studies.? CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in the United States to qualify as a physician and, in 1858, be allowed to practice in England. ODNB tells her story: ?She had conceived the ambition of entering medicine about 1844, partly because of the suffering of an acquaintance whose modesty had prevented her consulting a male doctor until her uterine cancer was too advanced for any treatment; partly to dissociate the term 'female physician' from abortionists; and, according to her own autobiography, because she did not wish to become dependent on a man through marriage . In 1847, after several years of private study and numerous rejections from medical schools, her application to the small, low-status medical school at Geneva in upstate New York was put to the students by the faculty, confident that a resounding rejection would result. The mischievous students, however, voted unanimously to admit her and then found themselves victims of their own practical joke when, in January 1849, Blackwell graduated MD above all 150 male students, an event that received widespread press coverage across the United States and in Great Britain.? A collection of lectures which she'd given in spring 1852, ?The Laws of Life, Blackwell outlines the four general principles that provide the foundation for her approach to understanding human physiology. These principles reappear in slightly different forms but are fundamentally unchanged throughout the rest of her writing? (Krug, 57-58). Contrary to much established thought which emphasised the differences between the sexes and races (and thus sexism and racism), ?Elizabeth Blackwell created her own path, integrating both traditional and new ideas or practices as they suited her personal or political needs. By using a liberal humanist approach emphasizing essential equality between the sexes as the foundation for interpreting the physiological ?facts? about the body, Blackwell offers an alternate approach to understanding both the processes and importance of human sexuality? (ibid, 71). First published in 1852, all editions are rare with just a handful of copies in institutions and similarly at auction. Krug, K., ?Women Ovulate, Men Spermate: Elizabeth Blackwell as a Feminist Physiologist? in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 7, No. 1, (July, 1996), pp.51-72.- $4,134
- $4,134
Aspects of Value
GRUBER Frederick C. Editor First edition. 8vo. 88 pp. Original grey cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (internally clean and unmarked; jacket slightly worn, spine panel toned, still a very good copy indeed). Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Inscribed by the editor Frederick C. Gruber to the American philosopher Israel Scheffler (1923-2014) in black ink to the half title 'To Israel Scheffler with highest regards Frederick Gruber November 4 1959'. A collection of four lectures prepared as the third series of the Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education with Elizabeth F. Flower on 'Present-Day Disagreements in Moral Philosophy', Philip P. Wiener on 'Values in the History of Ideas', Thomas A. Cowan on 'Social Interests and Value', and John L. Childs on 'Value Conflicts and the Education of Our Young'.- $103
- $103
Thus Spake Zarathustra. A Book for All and None
NIETZSCHE Friedrich Translated by Alexander Tille. First edition in English, first issue. 8vo. xxiii, [7], 488, 8 [publisher's advertisements] pp. Original blue cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt with blind-stamped decorative roundels, black coated endpapers, edges untrimmed (neat contemporary ownership inscription of 'Hugh E. Seebohm' to half title, a few isolated instances of pencilled underling, otherwise generally internally clean; some trivial shelf wear to extremities, corners gently bumped, an excellent copy). Housed in a morocco backed solander box. London, H. Henry and Co. Ltd. The first English translation of Nietzsche's defining philosophical work. A sprawling, rhapsodic work, written primarily in prose, Zarathustra served as a thunderous announcement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy. Under the guise of the central character Zarathustra, a re-invention and subversion of his namesake, Nietzsche expounds his declamatory message of the Übermensch, the death of God, and the transvaluation of all values. The present English translation was advertised as the eighth volume of a projected eleven volume set of Nietzsche's collected works, although confusingly it was in fact only the second title published in the series overall. The unbound sheets of the first edition were eventually purchased by the publisher T. Fisher Unwin, who re-issued the book with their imprint on the spine - the present example is the correct first issue with 'Henry and Co.' in gilt to the spine. An American edition also appeared later in the same year published by the Macmillan Company in New York. PMM, 370 (first edition).- $7,632
- $7,632
Large carte-de-visite showing an aristocratic Qajar youth and a eunuch
SEVRUGUIN Antoine Large albumen carte-de-visite, image measuring 99 by 143mm. Small pinhole to top of card, chip to bottom right corner, unclear ink inscription to verso, otherwise very good. Studio information of Sevruguin printed in gold to verso. Tehran, n.d. but A rare large carte-de-visite from the studio of Antoine Sevruguin (c.1838-1933), showing an aristocratic young man standing beside a eunuch who was most likely his servant. Like so many of his group portraits it speaks of power and class in Qajar society at the turn of the century. Though Sevruguin was a Russian subject, he spent the best part of his life in Iran. Born in the Russian Embassy in Tehran, he later settled in the city, establishing a photographic studio on ?Ala-al-Dawla (now Ferdowsi) Street. Of Armenian and Georgian origin, he mixed East and West in his identity and art ? a number of academics have argued that his images push beyond an Orientalist visual system that typically reduced the country to a set of pre-existing stereotypes. ?Living at a time when orientalist fervour was at its height and Europeans were using photographic images to construct and confirm their notions of the Orient, Sevruguin used his camera to construct counter-representations. ? Sevruguin does not over-simplify Iran; he complicates it.? (Navab, 114). In 1908, around 5,000 of Sevruguin?s 7,000 glass-plate negatives were destroyed in riots following the bombardment of the Majlis. The remaining plates were later confiscated by Reza Shah Pahlavi, who found the images at odds with his vision of a modernized Persia. Though Sevruguin doubtlessly produced tens of thousands of prints, those from the lost plates are scarce and even studio portraits (and other ephemeral carte-de-visites), such as this, are rare outside of Iran. Navab, Aphrodite Désirée, ?To Be or Not to Be an Orientalist?: The Ambivalent Art of Antoin Sevruguin? in Iranian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1/3 (Winter-Summer, 2002), pp.113-144.- $668
- $668
Adam wa Hawwa. [Adam and Eve.]
CHROMOLITHOGRAPHY. Chromolithograph, measuring 562 by 405mm. A few closed tears along old folds, corners slightly creased, some light spotting to margins and verso, otherwise good. Cairo, 1370 AH A bright and beautiful chromolithograph of Adam and Hawwa (Eve), frozen in their moment of temptation. It is a lovely example of how important figures and events from the Qur'an were represented in mid-century Arabic popular print. We have seen other, very similar, versions of this image from various presses in North Africa. The imprint, though near-indecipherable, states it was published in Cairo and therefore may have been inspired by the heroic prints of the Fine Arts Press. The present print has bolder, more opaque colour than the Fine Arts Press version, and a decorative floral border. We cannot locate any other examples in LibraryHub or OCLC. This indicates an absence of copies in Western institutions, but does not account for institutional holdings in North Africa and the Middle East.- $868
- $868
