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Poetry
Darkey Ditties. Poems. -
Elliott B. Henderson
1915 - Self Published, Columbus - First Edition
Elliott Blaine Henderson’s ninth collection of African-American poetry.
Amongst the poems are such titles as ‘Cispus Attucks’, ‘De Bes’ State in de Lan’’, ‘A Plantation “Step-erbout”’, ‘Some Negro Characteristics’; ‘A Retrospection’, and ‘Sich an Itchin’ in Mah Shin’.
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Price HK$ 1,200
1915 - Self Published, Columbus - First Edition
Elliott Blaine Henderson’s ninth collection of African-American poetry.Amongst the poems are such titles as ‘Cispus Attucks’, ‘De Bes’ State in de Lan’’, ‘A Plantation “Step-erbout”’, ‘Some Negro Characteristics’; ‘A Retrospection’, and ‘Sich an Itchin’ in Mah Shin’.
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Price HK$ 1,200
Heart of the West -
O. Henry (Pseud. William Sydney Porter)
1907 - The McClure Company, New York - First Edition
First edition of this collection of nineteen short western stories set mostly in Texas, by the American master of short stories with his comic eye, his gift for evoking speech and setting, and his unique approach to life's quirks of fate.
William Sydney Porter (pseud. O.Henry, 1862-1910) was one of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century. He lived in Texas from the age of 19 to 35 and had a short but colourful life, initially working as a pharmacist before moving into journalism.
In 1896 he was arrested for embezzling funds while working as a bookkeeper for a bank. In a moment of madness, he absconded on his way to the courthouse before his trial and fled to Honduras for six months. He returned to face trial after learning that his wife was dying of tuberculosis and served three years in jail. While in prison, he adopted the pen name O. Henry, and after his release he found great fame and popularity as a short story writer.
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Price HK$ 2,500
1907 - The McClure Company, New York - First Edition
First edition of this collection of nineteen short western stories set mostly in Texas, by the American master of short stories with his comic eye, his gift for evoking speech and setting, and his unique approach to life's quirks of fate.William Sydney Porter (pseud. O.Henry, 1862-1910) was one of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century. He lived in Texas from the age of 19 to 35 and had a short but colourful life, initially working as a pharmacist before moving into journalism.
In 1896 he was arrested for embezzling funds while working as a bookkeeper for a bank. In a moment of madness, he absconded on his way to the courthouse before his trial and fled to Honduras for six months. He returned to face trial after learning that his wife was dying of tuberculosis and served three years in jail. While in prison, he adopted the pen name O. Henry, and after his release he found great fame and popularity as a short story writer.
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Price HK$ 2,500
The Northern Clemency - SIGNED -
Philip Hensher
2008 - Fourth Estate, London - First Edition
‘Hensher’s novel is tremendously adroit, reminding us of what it’s like to sink luxuriously into the great novels of an earlier era: all-inclusive, interconnected, and lavishly detailed…’ – The New York Times
Set between the quiet suburbs of Sheffield and the bustle of London, and spanning twenty years, Philip Hensher’s epic novel – which follows the lives of two not quite upper-middle-class families who first encounter one another living on the same Sheffield street overlooking the Yorkshire moors – revisits the dawn of Thatcher’s Britain of the 1970s, and traces the volatile confidence and despair of the 80s, all the way through to the awakening of a new Britain in the 1990s.
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Price HK$ 1,000
2008 - Fourth Estate, London - First Edition
‘Hensher’s novel is tremendously adroit, reminding us of what it’s like to sink luxuriously into the great novels of an earlier era: all-inclusive, interconnected, and lavishly detailed…’ – The New York TimesSet between the quiet suburbs of Sheffield and the bustle of London, and spanning twenty years, Philip Hensher’s epic novel – which follows the lives of two not quite upper-middle-class families who first encounter one another living on the same Sheffield street overlooking the Yorkshire moors – revisits the dawn of Thatcher’s Britain of the 1970s, and traces the volatile confidence and despair of the 80s, all the way through to the awakening of a new Britain in the 1990s.
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Price HK$ 1,000
The Outsiders -
Susan Eloise Hinton
1967 - The Viking Press, New York - First Edition
‘Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.’
A superior example of the rare first edition of S.E. Hinton's first book, written while she was 16 and still in high school. Set in Oklahoma in the 1960s, the book was inspired by two rival gangs at her high school, the Greasers and the Socs; it was the basis for the 1983 cult film directed by Francis Ford Coppola which included a number of then unknown actors such as Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, and Diane Lane.
The dust jacket without chips, tears, or fading to the spine where the colours are still bright red, as they should be.
‘The Outsiders transformed young-adult fiction from a genre mostly about prom queens, football players and high school crushes to one that portrayed a darker, truer world.’ – The New York Times.
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Price HK$ 35,000
1967 - The Viking Press, New York - First Edition
‘Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.’A superior example of the rare first edition of S.E. Hinton's first book, written while she was 16 and still in high school. Set in Oklahoma in the 1960s, the book was inspired by two rival gangs at her high school, the Greasers and the Socs; it was the basis for the 1983 cult film directed by Francis Ford Coppola which included a number of then unknown actors such as Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, and Diane Lane.
The dust jacket without chips, tears, or fading to the spine where the colours are still bright red, as they should be.
‘The Outsiders transformed young-adult fiction from a genre mostly about prom queens, football players and high school crushes to one that portrayed a darker, truer world.’ – The New York Times.
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Price HK$ 35,000
Lions and Shadows - An Education in the Twenties -
Christopher Isherwood
1938 - Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London - First Edition, First Impression
First edition of the first of Isherwood’s fictional biographies. A captivating account of a young novelist’s development in the literary culture of 1920s Cambridge and London and of his experiences as he forged lifelong friendships with his peers W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Edward Upward.
‘That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands.’ - W. Somerset Maugham, after reading Lions and Shadows.
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Price HK$ 4,500
1938 - Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London - First Edition, First Impression
First edition of the first of Isherwood’s fictional biographies. A captivating account of a young novelist’s development in the literary culture of 1920s Cambridge and London and of his experiences as he forged lifelong friendships with his peers W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Edward Upward.‘That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands.’ - W. Somerset Maugham, after reading Lions and Shadows.
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Price HK$ 4,500
The Major Novels and Short Stories -
Jerome K Jerome
1886-1908 - Various, Bristol and London - All first edition first issue except for Three Men in a Boat (Second Issue) and Tommy and Co. (cheap edition).
A beautiful Zaehnsdorf bound set in ten volumes, consisting of: On the Stage and Off. London; The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow; Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog); Told After Supper; Diary of a Pilgrimage; Novel Notes; The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel; Tea-Table Talk; and Tommy and Co.
obviously the set includes one of the funniest English books ever written, ‘Three Men in a Boat’, of which in the words of Jerome K. Jerome ‘other books may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it’, which could sum up a number of the other works here.
Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) was born in Walsall, but moved to London with his family as a young boy. After leaving school at fourteen, he worked as a railway clerk, but spent much of his spare time acting with various theatre companies and reading in the library of the British Museum; his first novel, On the Stage – and Off was loosely based on his thespian experiences. His 1899 novel, Three Men in a Boat – a fictional though exaggerated account of an actual boat trip on the River Thames that Jerome took with two friends – became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, despite lacklustre critic reviews, selling a million copies in America alone, and bringing it’s author world wide fame.
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Price HK$ 15,000
1886-1908 - Various, Bristol and London - All first edition first issue except for Three Men in a Boat (Second Issue) and Tommy and Co. (cheap edition).
A beautiful Zaehnsdorf bound set in ten volumes, consisting of: On the Stage and Off. London; The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow; Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog); Told After Supper; Diary of a Pilgrimage; Novel Notes; The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel; Tea-Table Talk; and Tommy and Co.obviously the set includes one of the funniest English books ever written, ‘Three Men in a Boat’, of which in the words of Jerome K. Jerome ‘other books may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it’, which could sum up a number of the other works here.
Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) was born in Walsall, but moved to London with his family as a young boy. After leaving school at fourteen, he worked as a railway clerk, but spent much of his spare time acting with various theatre companies and reading in the library of the British Museum; his first novel, On the Stage – and Off was loosely based on his thespian experiences. His 1899 novel, Three Men in a Boat – a fictional though exaggerated account of an actual boat trip on the River Thames that Jerome took with two friends – became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, despite lacklustre critic reviews, selling a million copies in America alone, and bringing it’s author world wide fame.
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Price HK$ 15,000
Transition - A Complete Run - Numbers 1-27. -
Eugene Jolas (editor)
1927 to 1938 - Transition Press, Paris - First Editions
A rare complete set of the most influential and important literary magazine between the wars. Edited by Eugene Jolas, contributors are a whose who of writers, poets and artists of this magnificent period, including but not limited to:-
James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Elliot Paul, Man Ray, Robert McAlmon, Dylan Thomas, André Gide, Joan Miró, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Picasso, Paul Bowles, André Breton, William Carlos Williams,
Robert Graves, Franz Kafka, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Hart Crane, Max Ernst, Malcolm Cowley, Djuna Barnes, Harry Crosby, Archibald MacLeish, Constantin Brancusi, Cartier-Bresson, Louis Aragon, Kay Boyle, Juan Gris, and Aaron Copland, and as such, publishing for the first time some of the most linguistically and visually innovative art of the modern era.
Numbers 1-20 published between April 1927 and June 1930 by Transition with Shakespeare and Co., in Paris. Numbers 21-24 published between March 1932 and June 1936 by The Servire Press in The Hague. Volumes 25-27 published between fall 1936 and May 1938 by Transition in New York.
Included with the set is the Gertrude Stein’s ‘An Elucidation, printed in Transition, April 1927’ in original wrappers, and ‘Transition Pamphlet No 1’ (supplement to Transition no 23, 1934-35) containing the ‘Testimony against Gertrude Stein’.
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Price HK$ 45,000
1927 to 1938 - Transition Press, Paris - First Editions
A rare complete set of the most influential and important literary magazine between the wars. Edited by Eugene Jolas, contributors are a whose who of writers, poets and artists of this magnificent period, including but not limited to:-James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Elliot Paul, Man Ray, Robert McAlmon, Dylan Thomas, André Gide, Joan Miró, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Picasso, Paul Bowles, André Breton, William Carlos Williams,
Robert Graves, Franz Kafka, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Hart Crane, Max Ernst, Malcolm Cowley, Djuna Barnes, Harry Crosby, Archibald MacLeish, Constantin Brancusi, Cartier-Bresson, Louis Aragon, Kay Boyle, Juan Gris, and Aaron Copland, and as such, publishing for the first time some of the most linguistically and visually innovative art of the modern era.
Numbers 1-20 published between April 1927 and June 1930 by Transition with Shakespeare and Co., in Paris. Numbers 21-24 published between March 1932 and June 1936 by The Servire Press in The Hague. Volumes 25-27 published between fall 1936 and May 1938 by Transition in New York.
Included with the set is the Gertrude Stein’s ‘An Elucidation, printed in Transition, April 1927’ in original wrappers, and ‘Transition Pamphlet No 1’ (supplement to Transition no 23, 1934-35) containing the ‘Testimony against Gertrude Stein’.
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Price HK$ 45,000
Memoirs of a Booklegger -
Jack Kahane
1939 - Michael Joseph Ltd., London - First Edition
Jack Kahane founded the Obelisk Press based in Paris, in France in 1929, he took advantage of the fact that books published in France in English were not subject to the kind of censorship practised in Britain at the time.
He published among others Henry Millers ‘Tropic of Capricorn’, which had explicit sexual passages and and could therefore not be published in the U.S. Other author’s included James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell.
Kahane passed away just before the outbreak of World War II, having just finished this book of his memoirs. His son took over the press which later became the Olympia Press continuing in a similar tradition, being the first to publish works such as Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ and Burrough’s ‘Naked Lunch’.
First edition in the original scarce and unclipped dust jacket, not a common book as most of the edition were destroyed when a German bomb hit the publisher's warehouse.
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Price HK$ 4,500
1939 - Michael Joseph Ltd., London - First Edition
Jack Kahane founded the Obelisk Press based in Paris, in France in 1929, he took advantage of the fact that books published in France in English were not subject to the kind of censorship practised in Britain at the time.He published among others Henry Millers ‘Tropic of Capricorn’, which had explicit sexual passages and and could therefore not be published in the U.S. Other author’s included James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell.
Kahane passed away just before the outbreak of World War II, having just finished this book of his memoirs. His son took over the press which later became the Olympia Press continuing in a similar tradition, being the first to publish works such as Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ and Burrough’s ‘Naked Lunch’.
First edition in the original scarce and unclipped dust jacket, not a common book as most of the edition were destroyed when a German bomb hit the publisher's warehouse.
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Price HK$ 4,500