You searched for: Paul Theroux

The Worst Journey in the World. Antarctic 1910-1913 - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

1922 - Constable and Company Limited, London Bombay Sydney - First Edition
In 1910, a small British expedition sailed south aboard the Terra Nova, bound for the last great blank space on the map... Antarctica. They would endure temperatures below -70°F. Some would not return. A decade later, the youngest member of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, published what many still consider the greatest account of polar exploration, and definitely one of the most engagingly written.

First edition in the original boards, and
with an autographed thank you letter enclosed from Apsley Cherry-Garrard to Dr. Horace Steinbach, dated December 6th 1923.

‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done. Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin’ - A.C-G.

A nice set of the scarce first edition, first issue half white linen over pale ‘polar’ blue-grey paper-covered boards. Illustrated with five maps (three folding), six coloured plates, 13 folding panoramas (eleven of which were not included in later editions), and 56 photographs and sketches, ‘by the late Doctor Edward A. Wilson and other members of the expedition’.

The Worst Journey in the World is to travel writing what War and Peace is to the novel... a masterpiece.’ – The New York Review of Books. 
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Price HK$ 42,000



Journey Without Maps - Graham Greene

1936 - William Heinemann Ltd., London - First Edition
A near fine first edition of this most elusive title, Graham Greene’s first travel book, illustrated with 34 black and white photographs taken by him. Listed in National Geographic's 100 Greatest Adventure books.

Shortly after Greene's first child was born in December 1933 he had an impulse to explore Liberia, and over a glass of champagne asked his twenty-three year old cousin to accompany him. The result, according to Norman Sherry, was "one of the best travel books of our time..." (
The Life of Graham Greene).

‘A doctor in Freetown, Sierra Leone, P.D. Oakley, sued the publisher, Heinemann, after the book's publication, saying Greene's depiction of a character in the book, called Pa Oakley, also a doctor, was libellous. Heinemann withdrew the book from circulation and pulped the remaining copies’. It took 10 years for a second edition to be printed.’
 
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Price HK$ 15,000



A disturbing duo - The Family Arsenal - with - My Secret History - Paul Theroux

1976 - Hamish Hamilton, London - First Editions
Two first editions of of Paul Theroux’s more exotic and disturbing works.

The Family Arsenal - Hood, a renegade American diplomat, envisions a new urban order, flirts with terrorists. Mayo, has just made a political statement - stealing a Flemish painting. Murf the bomb-maker scrawls 'Arsenal Rule' across the city's walls, whilst Brodie bombs Euston and afterwards worries about her complexion. A novel of London lowlife and the dispossessed, and a powerful and violent thriller of disenchanted people.

‘One of the most evocative, intelligently crafted suspense novels in years - like the early fiction of Graham Greene.' -
The New York Times.

'Brilliant and haunting. . . the ingenious of the plot, the London setting. . . the trapped and interwoven people, and the balefully witty observation, have an undistracted force' -
Observer.

My Secret History - 'Nothing on the shelf has quite prepared the reader for My Secret History… Parent saunters into the book aged fifteen, shouldering a .22 Mossberg rifle as earlier, more innocent American heroes used to tote a fishing pole. In his pocket is a paperback translation of Dante's Inferno… He is a creature of naked and unquenchable ego, greedy for sex, money, experience, another life' - Observer.

‘Merges the two genres he's famous for... My Secret History is about the permanence of marriage in the face of mistrust and infidelity; it's about the wisdom of women and the foolishness of men; and it's about mature love as the necessary and sometimes successful antidote to youthful selfishness.’ - New York Times Book Review. 
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Price HK$ 900