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The Man With the Golden Arm -
Nelson Algren
1949 - Doubleday & Company, New York - First Edition
‘There’s people in hell who want ice water…’
Algren’s shockingly brilliant novel of the disinherited, The Man With the Golden Arm tells the sordid tale of Frankie Machine, the ‘golden arm’ dealer of a back street Chicago gambling den, whose heroin addiction and failing marriage drive him to the depths of despair.
The character of Frankie Machine was memorably brought to life on the silver screen by Frank Sinatra, in Otto Preminger’s 1955 film adaption of the novel, which co-starred Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker.
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Price HK$ 2,600
1949 - Doubleday & Company, New York - First Edition
‘There’s people in hell who want ice water…’Algren’s shockingly brilliant novel of the disinherited, The Man With the Golden Arm tells the sordid tale of Frankie Machine, the ‘golden arm’ dealer of a back street Chicago gambling den, whose heroin addiction and failing marriage drive him to the depths of despair.
The character of Frankie Machine was memorably brought to life on the silver screen by Frank Sinatra, in Otto Preminger’s 1955 film adaption of the novel, which co-starred Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker.
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Price HK$ 2,600
The Splendid Idle Forties. Stories of Old California -
Gertrude Atherton, Harrison Fisher (illustrator)
1902 - The Macmillan Company, New York - First Edition
‘Perhaps the best known collection of stories of that romantic period of California history when the incoming Americans were first intermingling with the Californians of rancho and presidio...’ – The Zamorano 80: A Selection of Distinguished California Books Made by Members of the Zamorano Club.
A fine bright example, of this collection of short stories, illustrated with eight plates by Harrison Fisher.
‘The finest stories ever written about early California’ – Phil Townsend Hanna.
The stories are: The Pearls of Loreto; The Ears of Twenty Americans; The Washtub Mail; The Conquest of Dona Jacoba; A Ramble with Eulogia; The Isle of Skulls; The Head of a Priest; La Perdida; Lukari's Story; Natalie Ivanhoff: A Memory of Fort Ross; The Vengeance of Padre Arroyo; The Bells of San Gabriel; and When the Devil was Well.
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Price HK$ 3,500
1902 - The Macmillan Company, New York - First Edition
‘Perhaps the best known collection of stories of that romantic period of California history when the incoming Americans were first intermingling with the Californians of rancho and presidio...’ – The Zamorano 80: A Selection of Distinguished California Books Made by Members of the Zamorano Club.A fine bright example, of this collection of short stories, illustrated with eight plates by Harrison Fisher.
‘The finest stories ever written about early California’ – Phil Townsend Hanna.
The stories are: The Pearls of Loreto; The Ears of Twenty Americans; The Washtub Mail; The Conquest of Dona Jacoba; A Ramble with Eulogia; The Isle of Skulls; The Head of a Priest; La Perdida; Lukari's Story; Natalie Ivanhoff: A Memory of Fort Ross; The Vengeance of Padre Arroyo; The Bells of San Gabriel; and When the Devil was Well.
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Price HK$ 3,500
The Adventures of Augie March -
Saul Bellow
1953 - The Viking Press, New York - First Edition, First Issue
‘I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.’
Saul Bellow’s masterful novel, tells the story of the eponymous Augie March, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression, whose numberless occupations and diverting encounters offer startling extremes of vivid realism and bravura philosophising.
‘The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further.’ – Martin Amis.
Winner of the National Book Award, 1954. Named by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels in the English language published since 1923.
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Price HK$ 7,000
1953 - The Viking Press, New York - First Edition, First Issue
‘I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.’Saul Bellow’s masterful novel, tells the story of the eponymous Augie March, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression, whose numberless occupations and diverting encounters offer startling extremes of vivid realism and bravura philosophising.
‘The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further.’ – Martin Amis.
Winner of the National Book Award, 1954. Named by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels in the English language published since 1923.
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Price HK$ 7,000
SOLD - The Lost Get-Back Boogie -
James Lee Burke
1986 - Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge - First Edition, first printing in Glossy Jacket
Rejected a total of 111 times over a period of nine years before the LSU finally agreed to publish it. During this time Burke was not able to get any other novel published and apparently this many rejections is still a publishing industry record. It was subsequently nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The Lost Get-Back Boogie is the story of Iry Paret, a young blues musician who moves to Montana following his release from a Louisiana prison and becomes involved in a family's struggle against a company that is polluting the local river, and with the estranged wife of his best friend.
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Price HK$ 0
1986 - Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge - First Edition, first printing in Glossy Jacket
Rejected a total of 111 times over a period of nine years before the LSU finally agreed to publish it. During this time Burke was not able to get any other novel published and apparently this many rejections is still a publishing industry record. It was subsequently nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.The Lost Get-Back Boogie is the story of Iry Paret, a young blues musician who moves to Montana following his release from a Louisiana prison and becomes involved in a family's struggle against a company that is polluting the local river, and with the estranged wife of his best friend.
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Price HK$ 0
Nova Express -
William S. Burroughs
1964 - Grove Press, New York - First Edition
‘A masterpiece of fantasy and reality, a carnival of horrors, a doomsday confrontation of man and his world.’
Burroughs’ ferociously political and prophetic novel – a parody of bureaucracy and human frailty, and the third in his linguistically ‘cut-up’ trilogy, following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded –fires the reader into the diabolical world of the Nova Mob, poised to wreak havoc and destruction upon the planet. Can Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police stop them before it’s too late…?
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Price HK$ 1,600
1964 - Grove Press, New York - First Edition
‘A masterpiece of fantasy and reality, a carnival of horrors, a doomsday confrontation of man and his world.’Burroughs’ ferociously political and prophetic novel – a parody of bureaucracy and human frailty, and the third in his linguistically ‘cut-up’ trilogy, following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded –fires the reader into the diabolical world of the Nova Mob, poised to wreak havoc and destruction upon the planet. Can Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police stop them before it’s too late…?
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Price HK$ 1,600
The Big Sleep -
Raymond Chandler
1939 - Alfred A. Knopf, New York - First Edition
‘What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.’
Chandler's first book and the introduction to the world of the famed private eye, Philip Marlowe, and established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel. The basis for the 1946 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and an endless source of private eye quotes.
‘It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in’.
A lovely bright copy, and absolutely no sign of restoration, rare and honest as you can expect this ‘dust jacket’ to be in a world where its going out of style (apologies). Housed in a custom clamshell cloth case.
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Price HK$ 70,000
1939 - Alfred A. Knopf, New York - First Edition
‘What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.’Chandler's first book and the introduction to the world of the famed private eye, Philip Marlowe, and established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel. The basis for the 1946 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and an endless source of private eye quotes.
‘It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in’.
A lovely bright copy, and absolutely no sign of restoration, rare and honest as you can expect this ‘dust jacket’ to be in a world where its going out of style (apologies). Housed in a custom clamshell cloth case.
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Price HK$ 70,000
Guard of Honor -
James Gould Cozzens
1948 - Harcourt, New York - First edition in scarce first issue dust jacket.
Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida. The reader is acutely aware of the war raging abroad and the effect it has had, or will have, on the multitude of servicemen who populate Cozzens's immense canvas.
‘No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it’. - The New York Times.
‘Every page of Guard of Honor gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork.’ - The New Yorker.
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Price HK$ 2,200
1948 - Harcourt, New York - First edition in scarce first issue dust jacket.
Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida. The reader is acutely aware of the war raging abroad and the effect it has had, or will have, on the multitude of servicemen who populate Cozzens's immense canvas. ‘No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it’. - The New York Times.
‘Every page of Guard of Honor gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork.’ - The New Yorker.
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Price HK$ 2,200
SOLD - The White Album -
Joan Didion
1979 - Simon and Schuster, New York - First Edition
First edition of Didion's essays which helped solidify her as an authority on Californian culture.
‘Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner... a great deal of Honolulu has always belonged for me to James Jones... A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.’
‘California belongs to Joan Didion’ – New York Times
‘Didion manages to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance, and Bishop James Pike) as interesting and suggestive as the monuments that win her dazzled admiration (Georgia O'Keeffe, the Hoover Dam, the mountains around Bogota). . . A timely and elegant collection.’ ― The New Yorker.
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Price HK$ 0
1979 - Simon and Schuster, New York - First Edition
First edition of Didion's essays which helped solidify her as an authority on Californian culture.‘Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner... a great deal of Honolulu has always belonged for me to James Jones... A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.’
‘California belongs to Joan Didion’ – New York Times
‘Didion manages to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance, and Bishop James Pike) as interesting and suggestive as the monuments that win her dazzled admiration (Georgia O'Keeffe, the Hoover Dam, the mountains around Bogota). . . A timely and elegant collection.’ ― The New Yorker.
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Price HK$ 0