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About this catalogue
Welcome to our new catalogue. If people’s lives take many forms, imposed by circumstances and events, or the individual’s choices, addictions and ambitions, as well as chance, and sometimes the determination to forge a personal destiny, does it follow that the record of those lives be allowed the same diversity of forms? We invite you to stretch your interpretation of biography to include a book secretly produced for a birthday party, the proceedings of a single night in Chelsea in 1934, one hundred and twenty-three passages each beginning with the same two words, as well as the familiar forms of memoir, autobiography, letters, diaries and journals, biography - critical, authorised and not, comprehensive, impressionistic - or from a mosaic of contributors, as well as those subjects who have successfully disappeared, a smaller group whose illnesses defined them, and others where the individual is presented via a single emotion, mostly friendship, some trusting to memory, one relying on ‘intricate and contradictory detail’, another who, according to her notebooks, “…am me, and I hope to become me more and more” and an influential example where the author’s pursuit of his subject takes over the book.
The Secret Orchard Of Roger Ackerley
New York: George Braziller. First American edition, 1975.
Roger Ackerley's daughter's version of an unusual childhood, told in the gripping style of detective genre, also shines a light on the love story behind one of Ackerley's families.
Fine in near fine dustwrapper with a nick at the crown of the spine.
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The Guest from the Future
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. First American edition, 1999.
Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin's meeting on a November evening in Leningrad in 1945 lasted 15 hours and had a huge effect on the two protagonists' subsequent lives. Akhmatova was declared an enemy of the state and persecuted. She believed that between them they had started the Cold War. Gyorgy Dalos argues she was right.
Review copy with publisher's promotional material laid in. Fine in dustwrapper.
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Anna of All the Russias
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. First English edition, 2005.
Poet, novelist and translator Elaine Feinstein draws on newly available material, covering the years Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's work was banned, her opposition to Stalin, and her determination to continue writing to give voice to the Russian people.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Louisa May Alcott - Life, Letters, and Journals.
New York: Gramercy Press. First American edition, 1995.
Published just a year after Louisa May Alcott's death in 1888, these journals and letters, plaited together and with linking chronological passages, include Alcott's first poem written at the age of eight, and poems from her mother and father, who encouraged the importance of writing.
Written, compiled and edited by Ednah D. Cheney
Fine in dustwrapper a little sunned on the spine.
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Richard Aldington and H.D.
Manchester: Manchester University Press. First English edition, 1995.
Both pioneers of modern literature, Richard Aldington and Hilda Dolittle, often separated by distance or divorce, wrote to each other about their work and feelings for each other. Caroline Zilboorg offers an intimate portrait of one of last century's most fascinating literary couples, from the later years c1930-1960.
Owner signature else fine in very good dustwrapper sunned adjacent to the spine of the rear panel.
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Dante in Love
London: Atlantic Books. First English edition, 2011.
'Dante in Love' is a very personal journey through Dante Alighieri's intellectual life in Medieval Florence. It explains the imagery of 'Divine Comedy' and Dante's 'relationship' with Beatrice Poltinari.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Stet
London: Granta. First English edition, 2000.
One of book publishing's most remarkable editors, Diana Athill's own writing brought her literary success in later years. 'Stet' charts her career with prestigious publishing house Andre Deutsch where she became known as 'the best editor in London'.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Saint Augustine
New York: Lipper / Viking. Reprint, 1999.
Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, is not just the patron saint of printers and theologians, but also brewers. Pulitzer prize-winner Garry Wills contemplates the life and thoughts of one of the most influential Christian philosophers, challenging long-held misconceptions and presenting his subject with candour and empathy.
Fine in dustwrapper with a faint mark on the rear panel.
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Djuna
New York: Viking. First American edition, 1995.
Although the very private Djuna Barnes called herself 'a most famous unknown', writers like Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot considered her a genius.
Phillip Herring illuminates all parts of Barnes's life and work, and looks closely at her best known work 'Nightwood', a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Lady in the Dark - Iris Barry and the Art of Film
New York: Columbia University Press. First American edition, 2014.
Robert Sitton has written a compelling, beautifully illustrated biography of Iris Barry, movie critic and curator, and film's first major archivist. This biography spans Barry's life from her time in Victorian Britain to her career in the United States where she became the first curator of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Desert Queen
London: Phoenix. First English paperback edition, 1997.
This is the untold story and a major reassessment of Gertrude Bell's life – until now characterised mainly as an intrepid traveller from Victorian Britain. Janet Wallach redefines Bell's important post-war role creating the modern Middle East, and her influence on British imperial policy-making that made her the most powerful woman in the British Empire.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell
New York: Pantheon Books. First American edition, 1993.
Over 300 never-before-published letters of painter Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's older sister, take the reader from the 1880s to 1961, through seventy years and two world wars, for a fresh look at the Bloomsbury Group and its times. Regina Marler's introduction and 25 black and white photographs add an extra dimension.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Italics are Mine
New York: Harcourt Brace and World. First American edition, 1969.
A well trod 20th century path from childhood in Tsarist Russia to exile in Berlin, Paris and, finally, the United States. Nina Berberova's memoir tells the stories of malaise of life in exile, including portraits of Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrey Bely. Clive James has called this work 'the best single book written about Russian culture in exile'.
Shadows of tape bleed on prelims, very good in dustwrapper.
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Mary Berenson - a Self-Portrait from Her Diaries and Letters
New York: W.W. Norton. First American edition, 1983.
Mary Berenson's beautifully written letters see her leave behind a dissatisfying marriage to live in Italy with Bernard Berenson, the foremost expert of his time in Italian Renaissance Art. She herself becomes an authority on art history, influencing American collectors during the first decade of the twentieth century. Her letters reveal a portrait of an age through the relationships forged at Villa I Tatti, the family home in Florence. Edited by Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels
Fine in very good dustwrapper.
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One Art - Letters
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. First American edition, 1994.
From Vassar College, Paris, Key West, Rio, Harvard and stops in between, this collection of 500+ letters by American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, centre on Bishop's lesser known poetry with a dark side, as well as her love for Lota Soares in Brazil. Written between 1928 and 1979, they are selected and edited by Robert Giroux.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Lunar Men
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 2002.
In the eighteenth century, a group of movers and shakers – a toy maker, a steam engine expert, a potter and an inventor – known as the Lunar Society of Birmingham – changed the face of England. They called themselves the 'lunaticks'. From the author of 'Hogarth', comes this vivid account of the friends who launched the industrial revolution – their politics, loves, friendships and love of knowledge that drove them to shape the modern age.
Spots of foxing to extremities, else fine in dustwrapper.
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A Little Original Sin
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. First American edition, 1981.
Jane Bowles (1917-1973), author of 'Two Serious Ladies', 'Camp Cataract' and 'In the Summer House' had a writing career that only spanned 10 years. She wrote about cultural identity, psychological disorder, physical illness, women's independence from men, and feelings of desperation.
Married to writer composer Paul Bowles, the couple moved to Tangier in the 1950s where she grew passionately attached to a local woman, later experiencing a writer's block that she could not resolve, before suffering a long illness.
Scattered foxing to top edge, very good in dustwrapper.
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Louise Brooks - Portrait of an Anti-Star
New York: New York Zoetrope. First American edition, 1986.
A song, graphics, letters, unfamiliar photographs, essays, including three by Louise Brooks, as well as by Lotte H. Eisner, Roland Jaccard, Andre Laudeand Tahar Ben Jeeloun, together with the largest single collection of personal photographs, show all sides of the legendary actress who rebelled against the idolatry of Hollywood to preserve her independence and her individuality.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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A Rage To Live
London: Little Brown and Company. First English edition, 1998.
The umpteenth biography of scholar and adventurer, Richard Burton who translated the erotic classic 'Kama Sutra', 'The Perfumed Garden' and 'The Arabian Nights'; however, this is the first where Isabel Burton is given equal status to her husband.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Mary Butts - Scenes from the Life
Kingston, NY: McPherson and Company. First American edition, 1998.
An early death left Mary Butts largely forgotten and lost until these previously unpublished letters, photographs, and passages of poems established her importance within the Modernist movement. They detail her childhood in Dorset, campaigning for civil liberties in London during World War One, Paris during the 1920s, and her prolific writing period in Penzance, Cornwall before her death in 1937, aged forty-six.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Calamity Jane
London: Neville Spearman. First English edition, 1961.
Martha Jane Canary, aka Calamity Jane, the toughest 'Gal' in the Wild West, 1870-1890, is famous as the legendary hard-drinking frontier woman. Glenn Clairmonte digs beyond the myth to reveal her broken marriage, love for Wild Bill Hickok and just how much it dominated her life.
Owner signature, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Carrington - a Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932
London: John Murray. First English edition, 1989.
The first full length biography of Dora Carrington revives her reputation as an artist and more than just a satellite member of the Bloomsbury Group, and devotee of Lytton Strachey. It unravels the relationships and events leading up to her suicide on the morning of 11 March 1932.
Carrington's doodles, sketches and drawings are scattered throughout.
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Me Cheeta - My Life in Hollywood
New York: Ecco. First American edition, 2009.
Cheeta, from the Tarzan movies, aided by his secretary James Lever, dishes the dirt on the Golden Age of Hollywood. This famous astute chimp saw plenty of action on set and behind the scenes and does not hold back.
This autobiography was published the previous year 'in slightly different form' by Fourth Estate, London. Perhaps some of Cheeta's insights were too tempting for American lawyers.
Scandal, name-dropping and gossip are touchingly countered by Cheeta's love for Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan - by far the best friend Cheeta ever had.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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A Saint in the Slave Trade
London: Sheed and Ward. First English edition, 1935.
St Peter Claver, Jesuit priest, and “slave of the slaves”, spent 40 years among the human cargo as it arrived in Cartegna, Colombia during the seventeeth century, greeting slaves with biscuits, brandy, tobacco and lemons. He tended to the lashed and dying in the holds and carried the sick ashore in his arms. And he absolved penniless negro women ahead of Spanish ladies.
The first part of this book outlines St Peter Claver's methods of conversion, the second discusses questions arising from his methods, the Catholic attitude to slavery and the nature of "practical Christianity".
Edgewear, else very good in dustwrapper darkened on the spine and chipped at edges.
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice
London: Jonathan Cape. First English edition, 1999.
Life with Douglas Cooper, beginning in London during 1949, on to the Chateau de Castille in Provence, and a decade of collecting 20th century art; illustrated.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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A Bodhisattva of the Book: William Dailey (1945-2017)
McMinnville, OR: Booktryst. First American edition, 2019.
Sixteen pieces about the American bookseller and, later, hotelier; contributors include Bettina Hubby, Peter Kraus, Johan Kugelberg, Joel Silver, Gina Stepaniuk and Barry Humphries.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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Kafka's Last Love
London: Secker and Warburg. First English edition, 2003.
Dora Diamant, with Franz Kafka the year before his death and then embroiled in the war and politics of the first half of the twentieth century, is revealed in this biography, 15 years in the making.
Kathi Diamant (not related) obtained material from the Comintern and Gestapo archives to tell Diamant's story against the cultural and political backdrop of twentieth century Europe.
Originally buried in an unmarked grave, her family added a tombstone in 1999 that says:"Who knows Dora knows what love is."
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper
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Duras
Normal, ILL: Dalkey Archive Press. First American edition, 1994.
'I would like to see someone write about me the way I write. Such a book would include everything at once,' Marguerite Duras once said. Alain Vircondelet meets her wish, purposely emulating Duras's own style of prose, and writing in the present tense.
This first full length biography separates fact from fiction, from her birth in colonial Indochina, through the intellectual skirmishes of the 1950s, through to the leftist movements of the 1960s, and the signing of Manifesto 343 in 1971 to say she had had an abortion.
Stamped 'Review Copy' on the half-title page, top edge dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Ralph Ellison
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 2007.
Ralph Ellison's reputation spans the spectrum from prophet and cultural hero, to an Uncle Tom who betrayed his race, as well as for having the longest and most publicised writer's block in history. Arnold Rampersand's biography of the Afro-American author of 'Invisible Man', tells how Ellison came to write his masterpiece and how he struggled to write another. Access to previously unpublished papers and letters reveal Ellison's inner life and the sense of failure and insecurity he felt towards the end of his life.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Walker Evans - A Biography
London: Thames and Hudson. First English edition, 1995.
Best known for his "pure documentary" photography for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, American Walker Evans profoundly influenced generations of photographers. Although his work spoke of social injustice, in his personal life he behaved like a privileged aristocrat. Rathbone reveals these contradictions and his obsession with Americana alongside 24 pages of black and white photography.
Top edge dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Ronald Firbank Memoirs and Critiques
London: Duckworth. First English edition, 1977.
Substantial pieces by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, Vyvyan Holland, Augustus John, Osbert Sitwell and Lord Berners, others by Grant Richards, Harold Nicolson, Thomas J. Firbank on "Uncle Ronald", and Nancy Cunard; and eight critical pieces written between 1924 and 1967 by, among others, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Wilson; 30+ pieces in all.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Talking to the Dead - Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
San Francisco: HarperCollins. First American edition, 2004.
Was it real or a hoax? First, the Fox sisters claimed to be in touch with spirits through seances, then they denied it, only later to reaffirm their faith in the spirit world. This book dispels much of the mystery in this late nineteenth century suspense story.
Helped along by photographic content, this book confirms that there's nothing more powerful than the presence of the dead among the living.
But a warning – not to be read after dark.
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper
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Wrestling with the Angel
Washington, DC: Counterpoint. First American edition, 2000.
New Zealand writer Janet Frame and her sisters 'held the silk purses of words' but were a family steeped in tragedy. The first part of Michael King's biography is about Frame's troubled family life, narrow escape from a lobotomy, and early career. The second half is devoted to her life following success. It calls into serious question the way in which society defines normality and mental health. Known for her reticence, Frame made her personal papers available for this biography.
There are endorsements from Doris Lessing, Michael Holroyd and Geoffrey Moorhouse on the rear panel of the dustwrapper.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Ava Gardner - 'Love is Nothing'
New York: St Martins Press. Reprint, 2006.
Ava Gardner's rags to riches story of successes and excesses generates far more excitement than her film roles.
It is said Ernest Hemingway saved one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento and that she knocked Howard Hughes's teeth out.
Discovered in Carolina, Gardner became a screen goddess and uninhibited star who famously married Frank Sinatra. Server leaves no stone unturned.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Constance Garnett - a Heroic Life
London: Sinclair Stevenson. First English edition, 1991.
The life of champion and translator of Russian literature, Constance Garnett is told by her grandson Richard Garnett.
By 1934, Garnett had translated 71 volumes, bringing Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pasternak and Gogol to a generation of English readers.
Her grandson opens things up to include people from the world of art, politics and culture, and closes with his personal memories.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Elizabeth Gaskell - a Habit of Stories
London: Faber and Faber. Reprint, 1993.
In 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell's tales of love, murder and industrial misery took Britain by storm. In her personal life she was a fast talker who gave us 'Cranfordisms', and true to form, died suddenly mid sentence. Jenny Uglow's multi award-winning biography shows how Gaskell avoids being pigeon-holed, covering all her work from social protest to historical romance to domestic comedy, and also draws on her lesser known works.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2006.
Letters were war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn's main form of social life.
Describing herself as 'a sour human yogurt' who 'never kept a writer's compost heap of diaries,' underplays the fact that she was the outstanding female war correspondent of the mid century decades. A nomadic work-horse, she wrote about Dachau and D-Day, and her dispatches from Vietnam in 1966 were the most ferocious attacks on US foreign policy yet published in the Western press.
This book was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Biography prize and the James Tait Black award.
Selected and edited by Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn's biographer.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Diary
London: Quartet. First English editions, 1988-1993.
Three volumes of autobiography covers the second half of Witold Gombrowicz’s life in Argentina, a small part of his life in Germany and France after his return to Europe in 1963 and, most of all, Poland which he left in 1939, never to return.
Gombrowicz is said to have changed the image and stereotype of the Pole through his diary - 'the faithful dog of my soul'.
'Diary', originally banned in Poland, then smuggled in, covers politics, religion, music, art, and rails against the provincial nature of Polish literature. A ranter and a raver perhaps, Gombrowicz also writes about lots of fun stuff.
All fine in dustwrappers. The three vols.
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[Memoirs 1931-1982]
London: Quartet Books. First English editions, 1989.
Two volumes: 'Forbidden Territory, 1931-1956' and 'Realms of Strife, 1957-1982' begin in Barcelona, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo's birthplace, where his family cheered on Franco and supported the Nazis.
He explains how political, sexual and social repression shaped him as a writer, his time as an expat living in Paris, how he came to terms with his homosexuality, and his ultimate disillusionment with politics.
Translated by Peter Bush.
Fine in dustwrappers. The two volumes
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An Illuminated Life
New York: W.W. Norton. First American edition, 2007.
Destroying personal papers and posing as Portugeuse to hide her African American roots, Belle de Costa Greene never made it easy for any biographer to tell her life story. Despite this, Heidi Ardizzone teases out the secret life of this trailblazer's success in a man's world, to becoming director of the Pierpont Morgan Library for 25 years. Her story is set against nineteenth and twentieth century art history, the world of scholarship, as well as class, race, and gender politics.
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper
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The Life of Fulke Greville
London: Oxford University Press. First English edition, 1971.
Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke (1554-1628), poet, dramatist and politician, was the principal court writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, where he engaged in friendly rivalry with Sir Philip Sidney. Ronald Rebholz's biography charts Greville's shift from optimistic humanist to pessimist.
Owner signature, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Viva Che
London: Lorrimer. Reprint, 1969.
Fifty individuals reflect on Che Guevara, contributors include: John Berger, Italo Calvino, Stokely Carmichael, Julio Cortazar, Susan Sontag, Fidel Castro, Graham Greene, Robert Lowell, Frederic Raphael, Oz Magazine, Christopher Logue,Thomas Merton; 24 pp of plates, and an introductory poem by Cesar Vallejo
Tape shadow from bookseller's sticker on front pastedown, else fine in very good dustwrapper nicked and creased at edges.
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Beautiful Shadow
London: Bloomsbury. Reprint, 2002.
'I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not,' said Patricia Highsmith, best known for her suspense novels, including creating the amoral killer Tom Ripley. Highsmith refused to answer questions about her private life but after her death in 1995, left behind volumes of personal papers. The female muses she drew upon for inspiration speak for the first time.
Extremities foxed. Very good in dustwrapper.
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Infidel
New York: Free Press. First Australian paperback edition, 2007.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of 'The Caged Virgin', begins her life in a traditional Muslim family in Somalia, where she is subjected to circumcision and later a forced marriage. She survives civil war, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four countries under dictatorship, eventually to seek asylum in the Netherlands.
Arguing for the reform of Islam, and the human rights of oppressed Muslim women, especially victims of honour killings, has led to a life under armed guard in the West but also won her an international reputation as a courageous freedom fighter.
Pictorial wrappers. Very good.
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Isabelle Huppert - Woman of Many Faces
New York: Harry N. Abrams. First American edition, 2005.
Exhibition catalogue. One hundred and nineteen reproductions of portraits of Isabelle Huppert by a heady group of photographers, see image for details, and text by authors Elfriede Jelinek, Patrice Chereau, Susan Sontag and Serge Toubiana.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Wrapped in Rainbows
New York: Scribner. First American edition, 2003.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), her life, works about the Afro-American experience, and her enduring influence are well documented in Valerie Boyd's biography, helping restore the black writer of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance to her rightful place in America's literary hall of fame.
Down and out by the end of her life, Hurston wrote she had 'been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots'. But today, most black women writers acknowledge her as a literary foremother. Her pot keeps filling up.
Remainder mark bottom edge, else fine in dustwrapper.
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The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick
London: Third Age Press. First English edition, 2007.
The first biography of Rex Jameson, who, as Mrs. Shufflewick, performed 'every circuit: music hall, concert party, gang show, variety, pantomime, gay, drag, working mens’ club, and was present at the birth of the New Wave alternative comedy scene', is constructed from Patrick Newley's professional relationship with Jameson as well as anecdotes from colleagues, friends, and extracts from routines.
Sample: 'I can't find out what's wrong with you,' the doctor said. I think it must be the drink.' 'Never mind doctor, I'll come back when you're sober.'
Newley includes rare photographs, transcribed routines and gives an honest yet affectionate depiction of his old friend.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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Humphrey Jennings - More than a Maker of Films
Hanover: University Press of New England. First American edition, 1982.
A long post-war legacy was expected from Humphrey Jennings had he not died accidentally in 1950, while at work, on location. Poet, artist, filmmaker, author of the collage history, 'Pandaemonium 1660-1886: the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers', and co-founder of the Mass Observation movement, 60 years before Google – Jennings has been referred to as the poet of English cinema for his evocative films of the Second World War.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Milena
London: Collins Harvill. First English edition, 1989.
Two women in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1940 made a pact, that whoever survived would bear witness. Milena Jesensky, a journalist, and one-time translator and lover of Franz Kafka, and journalist Marguerite Buber-Neumann, were both arrested for their opposition to Nazism. Only Buber-Neumann survived.
Although the links to Kafka are interesting, it is the bond between the two women and the risks they took for their friendship that make this book so moving.
Owner's stamp, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Jesus
London: Sinclair-Stevenson. First English edition, 1992.
Establishing a chronology of Jesus's life via the gospels and cultural and scientific beliefs of the time, A.N. Wilson seeks out the 'real' Jesus, and turns a few popular beliefs on their head.
Tables, diagrams and notes add to the interest.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Gwen John - A Life
London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2001.
Sue Roe's biography of the under-appreciated artist Gwen John, is the second in two decades, indicating a resurgence of interest.
John is best known for her paintings of a lone woman in a nearly bare setting. In her private life she was a secret lover of French sculptor Rodin.
The book has 16 pages of images.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Nora
London: Hamish Hamilton. First English edition, 1988.
Nora Barnacle, later Nora Joyce, eloped at the age of 20 with James Joyce the writer and lived with him until his death 37 years later. As his "portable Ireland", she was his living link to his homeland and the inspiration for many of his female characters.
Brenda Maddox delves into the Joyce's home life, their nomadic lifestyle, and Nora's life as a writer.
Fine in dustwrapper
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The Diary of Frida Kahlo - an Intimate Self-Portrait
London: Bloomsbury. First English paperback edition, [1998].
Frida Kahlo's illustrated journal for 1944-1954, the last ten years of her life, is printed as a full-colour facsimile edition – a very special publishing event. Seventy watercolours, sketches and self-portraits are complemented by Kahlo's text entries, each followed by translation and commentary. Her childhood, politics, relationship with Diego Rivera, and courage facing more than thirty-five operations to correct injuries from an earlier accident, find expression in her unique and powerful vision.
Introduction by novelist Carlos Fuentes, with commentary by Sarah Lowe.
Pictorial wrappers. Near fine.
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An Artful Life
New York: Grove Weidenfeld. First American edition, 1990.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, art dealer extraordinaire, and Picasso's ambassador to the outside world, championed avant-garde cubist artists before they were in fashion.
This first full-length biography examines his relationships with the artists he fostered, his struggle against political forces that led to exile and being stripped of his art holdings – setbacks he overcame to remain the most uncompromising art dealer of his day.
Extremities foxed, very good in dustwrapper
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The Knox Brothers
London: Fourth Estate. Reprint, 2013.
Booker prize-winner Penelope Fitzgerald was inspired to write a group biography about four influential men who made an important contribution to British history, who just happened to be her father and his three brothers. A Fleet Street journalist, the editor of 'Punch', a priest, and a classical scholar and code breaker in both world wars, form a family of believers and non-believers, who straddled the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian England. They are also funny and entertaining in Fitzgerald's hands.
The introduction is by Richard Holmes.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine
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Philip Larkin
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1993.
For years the dust jackets of Philip Larkin's books revealed little and all his personal documents were destroyed on his death. His damaging fall from grace as a misogynist, racist and porn addict, saw some libraries remove him from their shelves. Close friend and former poet laureate, Andrew Motion raises questions about the separation between life and work, and argues that the poems will survive whatever Larkin's reputation.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Moneymaker
London: Bantam Press. Reprint, 1999.
At the height of his fame, Scot John Law was the French Controller General of Finance, the so-called father of finance, and the man who dreamed up paper money and the credit economy. The rest of the time he was a gambler living off his winnings, eloping with another's man's wife, and escaping to Amsterdam, to narrowly avoid execution for killing a man in a duel.
Law's trajectory set the scene for our own contemporary boom-to-bust economy. In the teeth of opposition from powerful vested interests, Law won backing to set up the first French bank in 1716 to issue paper currency. He created a trading company that made its shareholders so wealthy that a new term - millionaires - was coined to describe them. But when the bubble burst and speculation gave way to panic, he fled to Venice with his creditors at his heels, and died there a poor man.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Memoirs and Correspondence
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1964.
Memoir begun in 1935, unfinished at her death in 1956; edited by E.W. Tedlock Jr (128pp); followed by c.200 letters written between 1890 and 1956, and twelve essays and reviews by Frieda Lawrence; illustrated, chronology and index, c.500pp. Typography, binding and dustwrapper by George Salter.
Owner signature on front pastedown, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Doris Lessing
New York: Carroll and Graf. First American edition, 2000.
Doris Lessing has been described as a hard nut to crack. In her own autobiography she warns, 'You will never get access here. You can't, this is the ultimate and inviolable privacy'.
With five biographies pending at the time, Carole Klein got in first. She reveals a woman continually reinventing herself, including embracing communism and feminism only to later discard them. The nut cracking makes it a little brittle and the overall tone is unsympathetic for a writer who was so keen to take on the task.
Remainder mark bottom edge, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Semi Invisible Man
London: Jonathan Cape. First English edition, 2008.
Graham Greene considered Norman Lewis 'among the best writers of our century' for his ground breaking travel writing, novels and essays. Lewis was a daring traveller almost until his nineties, on assignment to some of the remotest parts of the world.
His friend and editor Julian Evans provides the first proper assessment of Lewis's career, making sure an unsung literary hero gets his due.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Pinecone
London: Faber and Faber. Reprint, 2012.
The life of Sarah Losh, a resident of Wreay, Cumbria, as well as 'architect, designer and visionary', centres on her main work, St Mary's Church.
A study of church building, the book is also a tale about a radical family, the love between two sisters, the skill of local craftsmen, and the pulsing life of a village.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters
Toronto: University of Toronto Press. First Canadian edition (vol.2) and reprint (vol.1), 1995.
'Lift Up Your Hearts!': eight hundred letters, covering the years 1926-1957, include Lowry's walkthrough of 'Under The Volcano' for Jonathan Cape, his English publisher; as well as letters to Conrad Aiken, Jacques Barzun, Earle Birney, John Davenport, Albert Erskine, Robert Giroux, Harold Matson, Gerald Noxon, James Stern and many, many others.
Letters range from impassioned letters to his wives, encouragement to younger writers, and analysis of politics and current affairs.
Sketches and drawings that Lowry included in his lettters appear along with photographs.Edited with an introduction and annotations by Sherril E Grace
Both fine in dustwrapper. The two vols.
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Carson McCullers
London: The Women's Press. First English edition, 2001.
From Columbus, Georgia, Carson McCullers invented the term 'American loneliness' with her first novel 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter'. Just 23, she was part of a generation of enfants terribles from the South, hanging out with Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.
Translated from the French, this biography by 'Le Monde' journalist Josyanne Savigneau puts forward polarising views of McCullers's personality, her illnesses, and her identity as an American outsider.
Savigneau's passionate style is a good match for her controversial subject.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Giving Up the Ghost - a Memoir
London: Fourth Estate. First English edition, 2003.
Lauded for having the same masterly style as her novels, Hilary Mantel's autobiography reveals family secrets in Derbyshire during the 1950s, convent schools, English poltergeists, her marriage, and the long, painful path to a diagnosis of endometriosis – the ghosts that have haunted her as a writer.
The book is signed by the author.
Fine in dustwrapper a little rubbed on the front panel.
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Ngaio Marsh - a Life
London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 1991.
New Zealander Ngaio Marsh wrote more than 30 detective novels between 1934 and 1982, the year of her death. Nearly all reference Shakespearean plays and are laced with humour and bloodthirsty murder.
Margaret Lewis provides a good smattering of Kiwi history to help readers understand where and how Marsh grew up, and reveals the source of inspiration for each of her books.
Extremities evenly tanned, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Trial of John Donald Merrett
London: Butterworth. First English edition, 1929.
One of the 'Notable British Trials' series – the trial of John Donald Merrett who murdered his mother and was released on a 'Not Proven' verdict from the jury – is edited by the wonderful William Roughead, a trailblazer of the true crime genre.
Original blue cloth. Faint owner stamp, rear cover a little wrinkled; foldout map of the scene of the crime intact at rear. Very good. No dustwrapper.
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Lee Miller
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Reprint, 2006.
Lee Miller, the model and muse to artists like Man Ray, the subject of male fantasies, with an inventory of lovers during the pre-war years, morphed into a 'Vogue' photographer, documenting women's clothing in the Second World War. As war correspondent, she photographed corpses at Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, later admitting to being out of her depth on these assignments. From this period too came the controversial photo of Miller in Hitler's bathtub.
Carolyn Burke sticks close to Miller in her decline as she loses the interest to maintain her art, reinvents herself as a gourmet chef to deal with PTSD, her last decades marked by alcoholism.
Lavishly illustrated.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Sita
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. First American edition, 1977.
After 'Flying': if loving one person is good, loving two will be twice as good and onto an obsession; signed by Kate Millett.
Fine in dustwrapper after an illustration by the author in 1995.
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Beneath the Underdog
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1971.
'His world as composed' by the author, jazz bass player Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is light on musical works but heavy on sexual exploits and pimping.
Told in a stream of consciousness macho voice, it does however give a perspective on race and growing up black in America.
Edited by Nel King.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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How to Disappear - a Memoir for Misfits
Madison, WI: Terrace Books. First American edition., 2013.
Take a bunch of weird people in wonderful places, add some detective work, then weave them together with nostalgic commentary – and you end up with five entertaining quests written as comic essays, about characters who were momentarily famous and then disappeared. Unmet or briefly met, among them is the recluse who inspired Evelyn Waugh's character Sebastian Flyte in 'Brideshead Revisited', also a German artist who buys an island in the Hebrides, then vanishes never to be seen again. Fallowell's take on the death, and ultimate 'disappearance' of Princess Diana, who overcame her misfit persona, closes the book with a moving tribute.
Fallowell has been described as a never-heard of author, but once discovered, gained a legion of fans looking for more of his work. He won the 2012 PEN/Ackerley Prize for this book.
Fine in dustwrapper
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Glimpses of the Middle East
Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press. First English edition, 2015.
Arriving in Qatar in 1959 as the ambassador's wife, who 'knows everything, hears secrets, witnesses duplicity, but is not allowed to express an opinion', Patricia Moberly, at the age of 93, finally speaks plainly.
She shares her observations on the lives of women at the time, tradition and change, as well as the Intensive Care Unit she and her husband established in Gaza, and other medical aid programs.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine. 200 copies.
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Paula Modersohn-Becker - the Letters and Journals
New York: Taplinger Publishing. First American edition, 1983.
After decades of near oblivion, Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose life was cut short in 1907 at age 31, came to be regarded as one of the most important of the early German modernist painters.
She was the first woman to paint self-nudes and created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art.
Journals and letters for the years 1892-1907, edited by Gunter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken, capture the changes of early twentieth century Europe and provide a guide to the art capitals of Berlin, London and Paris as seen through Modersohn-Becker's eyes.
Illustrated with reproductions of the artist's work.
Fine in dustwrapper a little sunned on the spine.
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Tina Modotti - Photographer and Revolutionary
London: Pandora. First English edition, 1993.
In her award-winning biography, Margaret Hooks rescues Tina Modotti from the shadow of her mentor and lover Edward Weston, and throws off the straitjacket of her modelling career. She shows Modotti's influence as a member of a community of counter cultural artists, challenging the status quo. Modotti emerges as a talent who pioneered critical photo-journalism in 1920s Mexico, and a radical political activist, whose courage took her on dangerous missions in fascist Europe.
Owner stamp, remainder star bottom edg, else fine in dustwrapper.
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The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. First American edition, 1976.
In 1920s Paris, Adrienne Monnier's bookstore La Maison des Amis des Libres, was legendary for its author readings and nurturing the careers of writers like Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Not just a bookseller but an essayist, translator, partner of Sylvia Beach, and a central individual in literary life in Paris from 1915 until the early 1950s, Monnier's credits include publishing the French translation of 'Ulysses' after it had been banned in England and America.
The translation, introduction, and notes are by Richard McDougall.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Ottoline - the Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1963.
Lady Ottoline Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess and influential arts patron, who inspired many heroines in the novels of the writers she befriended.
During the First World War she provided refuge to conscientious objectors.
Her memoirs begin with the death of her father in 1877 when Morrell was four years old.
Introduction, and edited by Robert Gathorne-Hardy; illustrated.
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper with tape marks on the reverse
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William Morris
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1995.
The monumental biography of a Renaissance man in Victorian England, is a fresh take on the legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement.
Known mainly for his tapestries and wallpaper, Fiona MacCarthy addresses William Morris the poet, and political activist and founder of British socialism without the hero worship that characterised other biographies.
'History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed. Art has remembered the people, because they created'.
William Morris
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize
lllustrated. Includes cartoons of Morris
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Diana Mosley
London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2003.
The third Mitford daughter, Lady Diana Mosley (1910-2003), discredited herself to become known as 'that woman' who left her husband for Oswald Mosley, head of the British Fascist Party, and for making a close friend of Hitler, remaining unrepentant and defending him until her death.
Descriptions of conditions in wartime prisons where Mosley was interned and the rise of political extremism in the 1930s add historical value but ultimately nothing redeems Mosley in her choice of allegiance and denial of the Holocaust. At her request, the book was not published until after her death in 2003.
Scattered foxing to top edge, owner signature, else fine in dustwrapper.
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A Writer at War - Letters and Diaries 1939-1945
London: Short Books. First English edition, 2010.
Iris Murdoch's letters to Frank Thompson and David Hicks during World War Two, interspersed with extracts from her journals, are published for the first time as part of editor Peter J. Conradi's campaign to rectify Murdoch's two-dimensional portrayal in her widower's memoirs and the film 'Iris'.
Edited and introduced by Peter J. Conradi.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Murrow: His Life and Times
New York: Freundlich Books. First American edition, 1986.
The grainy baritone voice and plain prose of Edward R. Murrow are associated with journalistic integrity in broadcasting folklore.
A.M. Sperber pulls together twelve years of research, including FBI files on Murrow, from the Depression as the American radio correspondent of his generation, his broadcasts from London during World War Two, a CBS director during the McCarthy era and, much later, protagonist of 'Good Night and Good Luck', a movie about the latter period.
Sperber raises questions which lie at the heart of the current debate over the role of news in American public life.
Illustrated and indexed.
Fine in dustwrapper
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The Man Who Stopped Time
Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. First American edition, 2007.
In the life of Eadweard Muybridge, science meets foul murder, stop-motion photography meets courtroom drama. As a pioneer Victorian photographer, Muybridge is the father of the motion picture, largely overlooked by history – but this biography changes that.
He lived the second half of his life as the murderer of his wife's lover, acquitted after arguing his own insanity, and narrowly avoiding hanging.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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More Mere Mortals
Sydney: ABC Books. First Australian edition, 2006.
Was Queen Victoria a hypochondriac who summoned her doctor at all hours to listen to her moan about her bowel habits, and what did she ask him to slip into her coffin with her? Why was George Washington obsessed with his ivories and is that why his face is so grim on American currency? And who really has Oliver Cromwell's head? Following on from his successful first book 'Mere Mortals', Jim Leavesley once again puts medical history under the microscope to examine the maladies of the rich and famous.
It was Anton Chekhov, writer and doctor, who said, 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress. When I grow weary of one, I pass the night with the other...neither suffers because of my infidelity.' In this book they all suffer.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Spirit of Place - Nine Neo Romantic Artists and their Times
London: Constable. First English edition, 1988.
Malcolm Yorke has written the first major study of a group of artists that have defied definition. Nine English artists working before, during and after World War Two, shared no singular style but their work came to exemplify the confused wartime period. Yorke examines their art against the social conditions of the time.
Eight pages of colour plates and 100+ black and white reproductions, chronology for 1930-1956.
Fine in dustwrapper
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Pablo Neruda
New York: Bloomsbury. First American edition, 2004.
'Pablo Neruda was the King Midas of language. Everything he touched became poetry,' observed Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes.
Published to coincide with the centenary of Neruda's birth, 'A Passion for Life' is the first full portrait of the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, best known for 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair'.
Adam Feinstein shows Neruda the romantic lyricist become Neruda the exposer of social injustices, living underground for a year before fleeing Chile in a dramatic escape across the Andes into exile. But alongside the humanity of his work, Feinstein also shows Neruda's political fault lines and romantic betrayals that caused hurt to the women in his life.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Orientalist
London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2005.
Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, 'The Orientalist' traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942), a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince, and later a best-selling author in Nazi Germany.
Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, letters and diaries to piece together a life entirely built on subterfuge, to end up with an adventure story that explores some of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century.
Slight lean, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Full Bloom
New York: W.W. Norton. First American edition, 2004.
'Elegance shares a border with crankiness, independence with selfishness' – 'The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe'.
Best known for her sensual close-ups of flowers, desert landscapes, and bleached white cow skulls, as well as Santa Fe chic, Georgia O'Keefe is also remembered for her celebrated relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Although he marketed her art and broadened her audience, this biography reveals how he in fact hindered her abstract painting. This book goes beyond the marketing by Stieglitz and separates the sales pitch from the true intent of a remarkable artist.
Contains colour reproductions of O'Keeffe's work.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Portrait of a Turkish Family
London: Eland. Reissue, 1988.
A well-off family's decline into poverty takes place against the backdrop of the last days of the Ottoman Empire. This powerful anti-war book tells the 'other side' of the Gallipoli story. It describes how ordinary people closed the door on the Ottoman Empire to embrace the new Republic – and what they lost along the way.
First published in 1950, the afterword to this edition is by Ates Orga, Orga's son.
Pictorial wrappers. Very good.
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The Boasting Party
London: G. Heywood Hill, 2004.
Boasting was a sport of essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) who enjoyed a good 'vaunting and humiliation'.
The minutes of the Chelsea Boasting Party, held at St. Leonard's Terrace, March 8th, 1934 recorded twenty-eight boasts by six of Smith's guests, published in 2004 as a slim notebook.
Mr R.G.H. boasted he had given ring-worm to the present Archbishop of Canterbury, and that his mother was the adopted daughter of the Queen of the Cook Islands, and had an orchid named after her. Miss R.M. boasted she once swallowed 59 cherry-stones one after another.
But it was Mrs A.W. (later revealed to be writer Antonia White), who eclipsed them all with her winning boasts, including, 'Although the mother of two daughters, she had a certificate of her virginity signed by Pope Pius XI, for which she paid £80'.
Printed wrappers, stapled. Faint sunning to perimeter, else fine.
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The Orchard - a Remembrance of Georges Perec
Flint, Michigan: Bamberger Books. First American edition, 1988.
'The Orchard' is a record of the friendship of American Harry Mathews and Frenchman Georges Perec, both writers.
Perec died in 1982 at the age of 46, well-known in France for his novels and his weekly crossword puzzles in 'Le Point'.
Mathews adopts American writer Joe Brainard's 'I remember' structure to write about Perec and to express his dismay at the loss of a dear friend. 'Each "I remember",' he says is 'like pebbles cast ashore by a rough sea'.
In a foreword, Mathews explains the background to the format that he follows here, originally published in French in 1986.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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Eva Peron
New York: St Martin's Press. Reprint, 1995.
The life of Eva Peron, the wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, is shrouded in mystery, distortion and rumours. She is everything from saint to despot. This book analyses what is reality, what is folkore.
With access to newly declassified archives of the Peron government, Alicia Ortiz uncovers new information, including Juan Peron's connections to the Nazi Party.
Personal testimonies from people such as Father Benitez, Peron's personal confessor, and testimonies from associates, help explain some of Peron's controversial behaviour and the truth behind the legend.
Bump on corner of front board adjacent to spine, else fine in very good dustwrapper with a mark on the reverse.
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The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 2000.
An exact transcription of the 23 journals and journal fragments held by Smith College, Massachusetts, written by Sylvia Plath between the ages of eighteen and thirty, illuminate her student years, marriage to fellow writer Ted Hughes, and two years of living and working in New England.
It includes the full text of the two journals which Ted Hughes unsealed just before his death in 1998.
Edited and annotated by Karen V. Kukil.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Paeans for Peter Porter
London: Bridgewater Press. First English edition, 1999.
A birthday book for a poet - 'Paeans for Peter Porter' was a secret production of a celebration for Porter on his 70th birthday by 20 of his friends.
Contributors include: Julian Barnes, Les Murray, David Malouf, Martin Amis, Barry Humphries, Wendy Cope, Clive James and thirteen others.
'...God bless a man who had so much to show us,
We should thank God he found the time to know us,' wrote Clive James.
'...Master poet, Peter, you're this rock
tickled by roses in their climb;
you're our blue-edged flag, our fore-runner
first off the adzed blocks of home...,' wrote Les Murray.
One of 75 copies (total edition 113), this one unnumbered and marked 'contributor's copy'.
Original grey green cloth. Fine as issued without dustwrapper.
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[Autobiographies]
London: William Heinemann. First English editions, 1986, 1992.
Two volumes: 'A Life in Movies' and 'Million Dollar Movie' chart a not unfamiliar trajectory in the movie business of triumphs, exile and, posthumously, new triumphs and lasting influence. After films like '49th Parrallel' and 'The Red Shoes', the idiosyncratic English director split with Hollywood tycoons David Selznick and Sam Goldwyn, spending years in the wilderness until his reinstatement by Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, De Palma and Spielberg.
Powell's insider story goes behind the glamour to tell of the struggle between commerce and art – the lot of every noteworthy film director.
The second volume includes a reproduction of a 'Dear Marty' dedication note from Powell to Martin Scorsese.
Top edge dusty on 'Life', extremities darkened on 'Million', else both fine in dustwrappers. The two volumes
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A Stone in the Shade - Last Memoirs
Settrington, York: Stone Trough Books. First English edition, 2013.
This is the fourth and final volume of memoirs by Anthony Powell's wife – 'It was Violet who gently disillusioned me in the most tactful way ...' – whose career began only after years of supporting her husband in his work, and was later slowed down by years of caring for him.
Foreword by Antonia Fraser, illustrated.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Rasputin - the Last Word
St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. First Australian edition, 2000.
Uncensored papers, previously unavailable to biographers, provide fresh evidence of Rasputin, the Siberian 'holy peasant' who had such power over the Russian tsarina and whose malign influence helped lead to the downfall of the Romanovs. Eyewitness accounts from the official enquiry into Rasputin shed more light on his sensational murder.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Confessions of O
New York: The Viking Press. First American edition, 1979.
Twenty years after its first publication in 1954, Pauline Reage, the author of the erotic novel 'Story of O' – perhaps the most famous underground novel ever – gives a book length interview and explains the reasons for her anonymity.
Quoting from 'The New York Review of Books' – 'That Pauline Reage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade follows from the fact that art is more persuasive than propaganda'.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Smile Please
London: Andre Deutsch. First English edition, 1979.
'An unfinished autobiography' is an attempt by Jean Rhys to set the record straight over the hurt she carried that people judged her as a drifter, and for her 'vagabondage'.
Part 1 dips into her childhood as a white Creole in the West indies and Part 2 - 'It Began to Grow Cold' - focuses on her life in England.
Despite a resurgence of interest in 'Wild Sargasso Sea' after being forgotten for 20 years, Rhys hit tough times, none of which is sugar-coated in these short vignettes.
Foreword by Diana Athill, with her own biographical sketch.
Owner signature, top edge dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1985.
An Italian-born Jesuit missionary abroad in the later 16th and early 17th centuries, first in India, then China, became a celebrity figure and the first foreigner invited into the Forbidden City.
Not a linear biography, but a traveller's tale that follows a continent-hopping chronology, 'Memory Palace' has been described as 'a puzzle box of a book'. The reader must glue it together and not be put off by occasional gore.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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In Extremis
New York: Grove Press. First American edition, 1993.
The life of modernist poet Laura Riding (1901-1991), has drawn sharply divided opinion about her merits. Many have dismissed her as a domineering nutcase.
Although the core of 'In Extremis' is Riding's 14-year relationship with Robert Graves, it refutes the sexist assumption of early historians that Graves must have been the main force in their collaboration.
Despite being hostile towards Deborah Baker's biography and opposing publication, Riding is vindicated because, instead of her weird behaviour, it is her belief in poetry as the medium for truth-telling that resonates.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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No Bells on Sunday
London: Pavilion Books. First English edition, 1984.
Everyone, she said, has not only a story but a scream. The tormented actor Rachel Robert's journals, edited with a documentary biography by Alexander Walker, reflect the self-doubt and increasing desperation of the last 18 months of her life.
The award-winning Welsh actor in British New Wave films was also Rex Harrison's fourth wife, and became obsessed with him after their divorce.
"The hope that I can write is an intoxication," she wrote. "Please God, I can, that would save my life."
Fine in dustwrapper
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The Quest for Corvo
[London]: Folio Society. First edition thus, 1952.
'An experiment in biography' – part biography, part detective story, is the author's third biography where the research and writing are as much the subject as Frederick Rolfe's life story as a failed priest, who ended his days in a Venice slum.
Introduction by Sir Norman Birkett, 'A Memoir' by Sir Shane Leslie; first published in 1934.
Illustrated with photographs and facsimiles.
Scattered foxing to prelims and extremities. Very good in dustwrapper.
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The Complete Raven
Portsmouth: Privately printed by Callum James. First English editions, 2006-2011.
Fifteen volumes – A complete set of the original Raven books which, together, bring the previously supporting characters who crossed paths with Frederick Rolfe onto centre stage. The cast includes a conman, duchess, and librarian; the subject remains Frederick Rolfe and, in many of the volumes, Venice. All are #15 of fifty-eight numbered copies (total edition seventy copies). Brilliant, original research later collected, published and quickly out of print as Raven: the Turbulent World of Baron Corvo.
Plain wrappers, sewn, with matching labels. All fine. The fifteen volumes
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Moving Places - a Life at the Movies
New York: Harper and Row. First American edition, 1980.
Growing up with the movies in Florence, Alabama, and committing to the relationship in New York, Paris and London as a film critic; illustrated
Very good in dustwrapper with a couple of tears at the top of the rear panel.
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Ross and The New Yorker
London: Victor Gollancz. First English edition, 1952.
Standing on the bridge of the 'The New Yorker' with its captain/editor and glimpses of the crew below, Kramer exposes the nitty gritty reality that 'Rough house Ross' is in fact not the genteel sophisticate everyone expects, and his employees are slumming it amidst the chaos of the magazine's early days.
Good in dustwrapper.
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Australia's Brilliant Daughter, Ellis Rowan, Artist, Naturalist
Richmond, Vic: Greenhouse Publications. First Australian edition, 1984.
Long neglected, Ellis Rowan (1848-1922), was a botanical and wildlife artist and adventurous explorer, who searched for new and rare species of wildflowers to paint at a time when Australians generally did not appreciate their flora.
She made demanding expeditions until she was 68, travelling beyond Australia to rugged parts of New Guinea to paint the birds of paradise.
Inserted in the book is a 1983 promotional flyer of Ellis Rowan's life and work published by the National Library of Australia.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Bad Blood
London: Fourth Estate. First English edition, 2000.
'Bad Blood' is a 2000 work blending collective biography and memoir by the Anglo-Welsh literary critic and academic Lorna Sage. It was said that vinegar flowed through her pen. Set in post-war North Wales, it reflects on the dysfunctional generations of a family, its problems, and their effect on Sage.
Her triumph over ancestral doom and pursuit of an unusual career in the 1960s, made her a symbol for post-war women. 'We broke the rules and got away with it, for better and for worse, we're part of the shape of things to come,' she said.
'Perhaps ... it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends, because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies.' – The last sentence of Lorna Sage's memoir of her childhood.
'Bad Blood' won the Whitbread Biography Award in 2001, a week before Sage died at the age of 57.
Foxing to extremities, very good in fine dustwrapper.
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A Suppressed Cry
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First English edition, 1969.
Award-winning biographer, Victoria Glendinning writes about her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, born into a Quaker family in Victorian England, who must fight for an education.
Despite a stifling family, Winnie made it to Cambridge where she was a pioneering bluestocking until illness ended her life aged only 22.
Victoria Glendinning's first book, inscribed by her to Frank Collieson, Cambridge bookseller, and with autographed letters, signed from her to Collieson (1979, 1980) and a separate letter to the bookseller from Jane Ransom thanking him for finding a copy of this book and her thoughts on it.
Fine in very good dustwrapper rubbed on front and rear panels and creased along edges.
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Bernard Shaw
London: Chatto and Windus. First English editions, 1988-1992.
Fifteen years in the making – five volumes, the complete set reveal every aspect of Bernard Shaw as playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian, and more. Three volumes of biography, 'The Last Laugh' (vol.4) Shaw's descendants legal wranglings after his death and the 'Complete Notes and Cumulative Index' (vol. 5).
The five volumes all near fine or better in dustwrappers. The five volumes
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Forgotten Kings
New York: The Bookman Press. First American edition, 1998.
'Forgotten Kings' is an account of James Salter's first meeting and dealings with writer Irwin Shaw, taken from Salter's memoir 'Burning the Days', and ending with Shaw's illness and death.
'I touched his hair, something I had never done in life. It was like my own, curly, gray. I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it... He was much to me, father, great force, friend. He lived a life superior to mine, a life I envied and could barely fathom, his courage, loves, embrace, were all so large. We lived, I felt, in their shadow..'.
#177/200 numbered copies designed by Jerry Kelly and printed at the Stinehour Press.
Plain wrappers. Fine in dustwrapper.
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A Day in the Life of a Rare Book Dealer
New York: American Book Collector, 1980.
'So many people have asked me why I sold my rare book business that I have learned to reply succinctly - 'the pressure',' says rare book dealer George Sims. And what pressure it is!
The day begins at 6am, with high level appointments including the Prime Minister, lunch (caviar) with a Duke, a great deal more influence-wielding before Doris Day calls to sing him to sleep.
Single sheet measuring 36 x 26cms., printed both sides, then folded twice for posting. Very good.
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Stephen Sondheim
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1998.
The first biography of the composer and lyricist who has led the stage musical down new, fabulous subject paths, takes a behind-the-scenes look at Stephen Sondheim's productions and evaluates his contribution to Broadway musicals, starting with 'West Side Story' in 1956.
Meryl Secrest delves into his emotionally deprived silver-spoon childhood, homosexuality, and his 25 years of psycho-analysis.
'There's a hole in the world like a great big pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit...
At the top of the hole sit the privileged few
Making mock of the vermin in the lonely zoo
turning beauty to fllth and greed...'
Lyrics from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Includes 95 previously unseen photographs
Fine in very good dustwrapper faded on the spine.
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Lost Property
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1991.
Inherited wealth, related fame and acquaintances, Cold War espionage, 'Grand Street', his father, multiple sclerosis: life as a ferocious comedy according to Ben Sonnenberg, who said autobiography was an 'unruly art'...and 'more autoerotic than I knew before I began....'
Amidst all the posing and youthful riot that explodes into 'anarchy and sabotage', comes his real achievement – becoming founding editor of one of the important journals of our time.
Foxing to extremities, very good in dustwrapper.
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The Interior Castle - the Art and Life of Jean Stafford
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1992.
From her childhood in Colorado, through the twists and turns of American Literature during the mid twentieth century, Jean Stafford is worth remembering, if nothing else, as the author of 'The Mountain Lion'.
Her stories with titles like 'Children Are Bored on Sunday' were published in 'The New Yorker' and honoured in 1970 with a Pulitzer Prize.
Stafford's disenchanted vision started with her father's loss of fortune and growing up in a boarding house. After joining the Southern Critics, she married poet Robert Lovell, struggled with Catholicism, confronted domestic violence, and always and forever, searched for a safe place to be – an interior castle.
Review copy with publisher's slip laid in. Fine in dustwrapper
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Christina Stead
Port Melbourne, Vic: William Heinemann. First Australian edition, 1993.
The most comprehensive biography of the Australian novelist Christina Stead is as nomadic and cosmopolitan as its subject.
Stead left parochial Sydney in 1928 at the age of 26 and only returned when she was 72, spending her whole writing life on the other side of the world. From London, she moved to the heady Paris of the 1920s, and later fled McCarthyist New York – a city Stead loved and hated – for Europe. Her novels followed her nomadic life and were regarded as 'un-Australian'.
Most would-be biographers had the door slammed in their face. Rowley stayed the course to do justice to a major novelist and global citizen.
This biography won the National Book Council Award when it was first published in Australia in 1993.
Edgewear, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Saul Steinberg
New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday. First American edition, 2014.
The first complete portrait of artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg, begins in Romania when the Second World War forces him to emigrate to the United States. On a single day, he became a US citizen, an officer in the US Navy and a member of the wartime intelligence agency, sent out to spy in China, North Africa and Italy.
After the war, he returned to his art to become one of 'The New Yorker's' most iconic satirical artists. He shot to fame with his illustration 'View of the World from Ninth Avenue' that served as the magazine's cover in March, 1976.
Author Deirdre Blair is a national Book Award winner.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges
London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1991.
Beginning, 'Like nearly everyone else, with the exception of a few crowned heads, hereditary multimillionaires, and other neurotic characters, I know little of whence I came.' Edited and adapted by Sandy Sturges, the author's wife.
Very good in good dustwrapper creased at the top of the rear panel.
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Violet Trefusis - Life and Letters
London: Hamish Hamilton. First English edition, 1976.
English novelist Violet Trefusis was also inspiration for characters in novels by her contemporaries notably Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford and Harold Acton.
The book includes a selection of letters between her and Vita Sackville-West (1910-1921), showing a passion so strong that even after 40 years she could write of the love that 'always burns in my heart whenever I think of you'.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Excursions in the Real World
Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. First Canadian edition, 1993.
Twenty-nine autobiographical sketches begin with 'Places do not die as people do, but they often change so fundamentally that little is left of what they once were'.
The fragments that make up this memoir – William Trevor's childhood, parent's marriage, Dublin education, rural, small-town life – are vintage Trevor.
There are also short essays on his travels in Venice and Iran and illustrations by Lucy Willis.
Signed by the author.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Cock Of The Walk
Albuquerque, NM: University Of New Mexico Press. First American edition, 1955.
The biography of Doroteo Arango, aka Pancho Villa is the story, as it is told in Mexico, of how a bandit became a self-styled leader of the people's revolution.
Inscribed to Harold and Joy Oliver by the author.
Very good in dustwrapper
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For Sylvia - an Honest Account
London: Chatto and Windus and The Hogarth Press. First English edition, 1985.
For over 40 years, Valentine Ackland was Sylvia Townsend Warner's companion and closest friend. Also a writer and poet, she left behind this brief autobiographical essay. It is frank regarding her lesbian relationships, and unconsummated marriage, a disappointment redeemed by her love for Sylvia.
Foreword by Bea Howe
Fine in dustwrapper a little sunned on the spine.
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Evelyn Waugh
London: Dent. First English editions, 1986.
Two volumes: 'The Early Years 1903-1939' (published 1986) and 'No Abiding City 1939-1966' (1992) form the most detailed account ever published of Evelyn Waugh and his work.
Together, they cover his childhood, years at Oxford, marriage, expeditions to Africa and other places.
Explored in equal measure are his reputation as defender of conservatism, a brilliant clown, and a serious artist with a melancholy heart, who disengaged from the world after 1945.
Both volumes fine in dustwrappers. The two vols.
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Medicine Man - the Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome
London: The British Museum Press. First English edition, 2003.
Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) built up one of the world's largest museum collections – his own Museum of Man – containing over 125,000 both priceless and banal artefacts that span centuries and continents.
Over 500 illustrations and seven essays give an insight into the history of collecting as well as the material culture of health and medicine.
Now scattered across numerous institutions, 'Medicine Man' reunites a mix of objects from the 'forgotten' museum.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine
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The Letters of Edith Wharton
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. First American edition, 1988.
Four hundred letters, from the surviving four thousand – from her first letter in 1874, written when Edith Wharton was 12, to her last letter, penned just days before her death in 1937 – tell the story of how a self-critical late starter became a productive and acclaimed writer.
Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921 for her novel 'The Age of Innocence', a portrayal of the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. Yet despite the accolades, there was a mixed critical understanding of her work.
Wharton corresponded with writers like Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Bernard Berenson. Letters to her mid-life lover, Morton Fullerton, for years assumed destroyed, describe him as the love of her life and 'ideal intellectual partner'.
Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, R.W.B, and Nancy Lewis.
Over 50 photographs.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde
London: Fourth Estate. First English edition, 2000.
This comprehensive volume of fifteen hundred+ letters, written between 1875-1900: from Oxford, London, America, prison, Paris, Berneval, Naples, was published on the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death.
It is edited by Martin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Mary Wollstonecraft - a Revolutionary Life
New York: Columbia University Press. First American edition, 2000.
Eighteenth century pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1792). Her legacy stalled for almost a century while her lifestyle received more harsh judgmental attention than her writing. Yet she inspired Jane Austen and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
With the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality became increasingly important.
Her crowded world of other remarkable women, writers and friends are louder than the voices of her detractors.
Illustrated.
One annotation in text, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Autobiography
London: The Hogarth Press. First English editions, 1960-1969.
Leonard Woolf's complete autobiography: 'Sowing', 'Growing', 'Starting Again', 'Downhill All the Way' and 'The Journey Not the Arrival Matters', includes his childhood, writing career, marriage to Virginia Woolf, beginnings of the Bloomsbury Group, life during the war years, and start of the Hogarth Press.
'I see myself as a panther, pacing up and down in a cage, gazing through the bars...'
Owners' signatures in 2 vols., discreet bookplate of the bibliographer of the Hogarth Press in all 5vols. All very good in dustwrappers with the no. of vols 2-5 written on the spine. The five volumes
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Virginia Woolf
London: The Hogarth Press. First English edition (vol.1) and second impression (vol.2), 1972.
As Virginia Woolf's nephew, Quentin Bell had unprecedented access to all her private documents and diaries.
Two volumes: Virginia Stephen 1882-1912 and Mrs. Woolf 1912-1941 – from birth to the courtship between Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the formation of the Bloomsbury Group, and her prolonged mental breakdown – and most interesting of all, her growing reputation as a novelist and the struggles involved in the last decade of her life.
Both volumes fine in dustwrappers in original slipcase as issued. The two volumes
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Leonard Woolf
London: Simon and Schuster. First English edition, 2006.
A young administrator in colonial Ceylon, involvement in the early Labour Party, a maverick socialist whose passionately argued belief in collective security to prevent war, helped underpin the League of Nations – Leonard Woolf was always much more than the popular portrayal of him as either Virginia Woolf's carer and protector or as her oppressor.
This biography successfully keeps Virginia in second place, instead bringing out her husband's full stature.
His mantra 'Nothing matters, and everything matters' hints at the stability and wisdom he contributed to the Bloomsbury Group.
Extremities dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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Frances A. Yates 1899-1981
London: The Warburg Institute. First English edition, 1982.
These seven collected pieces about the Renaissance historian Frances A. Yates were originally printed separately in 'Who's Who', 'The Times' obituaries, 'The Sunday Times', or spoken at her funeral.
Historians did not know how to place Yates. She created her own discipline and her books were written in an engaging, conversational style. Her two heroes, to whom all her later research was related, were William Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno. The contributors to this collection are unanimous that Yates generated excitement for Renaissance life and thought, and was a pathfinder who stood outside conventional academia.
Edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper, E.H. Gombrich, Margaret Mann Phillips and Sydney Anglo.
illustrated, list of Frances Yates' writings, 39pp.
Printed wrappers. A little darkened around perimeter, else fine.
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A Tragic Honesty - the Life and Work of Richard Yates
New York: Picador. First American edition, 2003.
The first biography of Richard Yates is a roller coaster ride where the author is celebrated in his prime, forgotten in his final years, only to be championed anew by modern writers.
Yates exposed readers to the 'Age of Anxiety' and the quiet desperation of the American middle class in classic novels such as 'Revolutionary Road' and 'The Easter Parade'.
A life of calamity began with an unstable itinerant home life, his youth spent during the Depression era, moving between Connecticut and New York city, hounded by creditors every step of the way. There followed a prestigious stint in Hollywood and a period of time as Robert Kennedy's speechwriter. However, his demons brought more suffering. You will feel his struggle.
Fine in dustwrapper
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