The Yellow Book - Aubrey Beardsley

April 1894-April 1897 - Elkin Mathews &, London
A complete, clean and better than normally encountered thirteen volume set of this groundbreaking art nouveau publication, in the publisher’s bright yellow illustrated covers with designs by Aubrey Beardsley. Together with ‘A Selection’ published in 1950 and bound in yellow cloth to match the earlier set. Fourteen volumes in total.

From its initial visually arresting issue, for which Aubrey Beardsley was art editor and for which Max Beerbohm wrote an essay, ‘
A Defence of Cosmetics’, ‘The Yellow Book’ attained immediate notoriety.

Published by John Lane and edited by Henry Harland, ‘
The Yellow Book’ attracted many outstanding writers and artists of the era, such as Arnold Bennett, Charlotte Mew, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Richard Le Gallienne, and Walter Sickert.

Although dominated by the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, and his decadent fin de siècle aura, many other distinguished artists contributed to the quarterly, notably Frederic Leighton, Will Rothenstein, Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer; contributors to the text included Max Beerbohm, John Buchan, Baron Corvo, Edmund Gosse, Kenneth Grahame, Henry James, E. Nesbit and W. B. Yeats.
 
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Price HK$ 10,000



Four Quartets - T. S. Eliot

1996 - The Rampant Lions Press, Cambridge - Limited Edition
A fine large private press presentation of what Eliot himself considered to be his finest work. Designed and printed by Sebastian Carter, who has inscribed and dated this particular copy to the authors Jill Paton Walsh, Baroness Hemingford and her husband John Rowe Townsend.

Number 32 of 200 large folios from the Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge, England. Elegantly hand-bound and printed on handmade paper, and in fine matching slipcase.

Four Quartets’ is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in ’The Waste Land’. First published individually from 1936 to 1942.

Here, in four linked poems (’
Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘Little Gidding’), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought.

Four Quartets’ is the culminating achievement by a man many feel to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism. 
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Price HK$ 9,000



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



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, Georges Braque, Kay Boyle, Elliot Paul, Man Ray, Robert McAlmon, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, William Carlos Williams, Robert Graves, Hart Crane, André Gide, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Malcolm Cowley, Djuna Barnes, Franz Kafka, Harry Crosby, Archibald MacLeish, Samuel Beckett, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Cartier-Bresson, Dylan Thomas, Louis Aragon, Le Corbusier and Aaron Copland.

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



1912 - George Allen &, London - Early Illustrated Edition
A large and beautifully illustrated volume. With thirteen mounted coloured plates by Edward Julius Detmold, whose love of natural history and talent (exhibiting works at the Royal Academy when he was 13 years old), have combined perfectly with Maeterlinck’s exuberantly poetic work, in which he expresses his philosophy of the human condition.

The renowned Belgian poet and dramatist offers brilliant proof in this, his most popular work, that ‘
no living creature, not even man, has achieved in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved.’ From their amazingly intricate feats of architecture to their intrinsic sense of self-sacrifice, Maeterlinck takes a ‘bee's-eye view’ of the most orderly society on Earth. 
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Price HK$ 4,500



The Poetry of Sport - Hedley Peek (editor)

1896 - Longmans, London and Bombay - First Edition
‘Haste, ranger, to the Athol mountains blue! Unleash the hounds, and let the bugles sing! The thousand traces in the morning dew, the bounding deer,the black-cock on the wing, bespeak the rout of Scotland’s gallant king...from cairn of Bruar to the dark Glen-Morre, the forest’s in a howl, and all is wild uproar!’

A handsomely bound edition, with a distinctly Glaswegian accent, being bound in Glasgow and owned by the renowned medical Professor David Fyfe Anderson.

Containing a chapter on classical allusions to sport by Andrew Lang, and a lively preface to the Badminton Library by A.E.T Watson. Accompanied with illustrations by artists A. Thorburn, Lucien Davis, and C.E Brock, among others, this is a lovely compilation of poetry on the subject of sport for young men in the late eighteen-hundreds, primarily depicting activities such as fishing, hunting, and shooting.
 
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Price HK$ 2,000



1880 - William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London - First Edition
I think you do me much honour by preserving my scribbles’ writes the colourful and eccentric Sharpe in the tipped in letter that accompanies his finely bound Ballad Book, re-edited by David Laing, with additions from Sharpe's manuscripts, and which he first printed only 30 copies in 1823, although according to Henderson, the majority of the added ballads in 1880 were of more or less questionable authenticity (ODNB). The final portion of the book prints Sir Walter Scott’s commentary on the original poems, and is taken from correspondence between Scott and his friend Sharpe.

Scarce. Illustrated with a colour frontispiece portrait, woodblock engraving plate and headpiece (as used for the original 1823 edition).

A speculative note regarding the letter - As stated in the editor’s introduction (ix) ‘
Mr Sharpe’s own annotated copy’ was carefully followed to produce this work, a copy that was ‘in the possession of Sir James Gibson-Craig’. Gibson-Craig had one of the finest collection of Scottish works ever assembled, and other correspondence from Sharpe to Gibson-Craig did begin with ‘Signor Mio’, leading us to speculate that this letter accompanied the original and rare 1823 printing of which only 30 were produced, and which in this case was later given by Sharpe to Gibson-Craig. 
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Price HK$ 5,000