Search Results: Fiction (Early 20th Century) from Sumner & Stillman

1922. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922. Original blue-grey cloth lettered in gilt, with dust jacket. First Edition of this novel, published about two months before Secker's UK edition. It is the picaresque tale of Aaron Sisson, a flute-playing coal miner -- who abandons his wife and the mines to try to make a living with his flute. According to the dust jacket, this constitutes the final volume in Lawrence's trilogy beginning with THE RAINBOW and WOMEN IN LOVE. Everyone, even Frieda, hated the book except Seltzer, who had written from America that the book was wonderful. Secker apparently had some difficulty in accepting the manuscript as it was and begged Lawrence to make alterations, which Lawrence refused to do... However, someone, perhaps without Lawrence's knowledge, excised sections [including one about the Royal Family] from the Secker text which remained in the American edition... and which have not been replaced in any English edition of the novel. [Roberts] An example of this is the… Read More

1913. New York: The Century Company, 1913. 1 page undated ads. Original light green cloth decorated in dark green and black, with dust jacket. First Edition of London's prizefighting tale about "a white backwoods giant who would rather read Browning than slug his opponents" [Sinclair], prompted by his coverage of the Johnson-Jeffries fight in Reno. The very title of this book indicates London's preoccupation with the concept of the "brute" which underlies the social behavior of men and animals alike. London had recently left Macmillan in a dispute over royalties, but would find Century to be much less patient or understanding; he ultimately had to beg his former publisher to take him back. THE ABYSMAL BRUTE includes a frontispiece by Gordon Grant. This copy is in the second binding state, which is identical to the first except for color, and is in fine condition. The three-color pictorial dust jacket shows a man carrying a rifle with a buck slung over his shoulder; this jacket is near-fine, with a… Read More

1919. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1919. Original blue cloth decorated in gilt, with dust jacket. First Edition, first impression. Because no American periodical would serialize it, THE ARROW OF GOLD was published there about four months before (and lacking many of Conrad's last-minute changes made in time for) the London edition. This copy is from the first impression, with only 20 books listed opposite the title page -- THE SHADOW LINE having been omitted; the second impression is the same but is on thinner paper in the "Deep Sea" limp-leather binding. (There were then third and fourth impressions in 1919, in cloth and in limp leather respectively, listing all 21 books and with several minor alterations in the text.) The volume is in fine, bright condition. Included is the very scarce dust jacket (scarcer, in our opinion, than the jackets for several earlier American Conrad titles such as VICTORY and WITHIN THE TIDES). The jacket is unusual on two counts: first, it is pictorial (well...… Read More

1919. [advance copy in wrappers] London: T. Fisher Unwin, (1919). Original color pictorial wrappers. First English Edition, advance (colonial?) copy in pictorial wrappers. For the first English edition, Cagle cites the usual green cloth binding (for domestic copies), plus copies in a similar green cloth binding with "Unwin's Library" on the spine (for colonial copies). Cagle does not mention seeing any colonial copies in wrappers, but he does mention an advance copy at the Lilly Library that is bound in wrappers created from the very uncommon "a" dust jacket for this book. This copy is identical to that copy -- confirmed as a "salesman's advance copy" of the first English edition, in fact, by a Lilly librarian (correspondence included). At the foot of the title page is the ink-stamp of a Buenos Aires bookseller -- so it is likely that this "advance copy" was sent right out to Argentina; Supino mentions another copy from Australia -- "this might indicate that such copies had a colonial distribution."… Read More

1919. London: T. Fisher Unwin, (1919). Original dark green cloth, with dust jacket. First English Edition of this novel set in 1870s Marseille, a port Conrad knew well from his earliest days as a seaman (in France 1874-1879) -- thus English was not his second language but his third. The English edition of this tale was published four months after (and including corrections made by Conrad too late for) the American edition. Unwin published three of Conrad's first four books (1895-1898), but then no others until this one -- which explains why only those four works are cited on the rear panel of this ARROW jacket. This copy does not have the "A" in the p. 67 headline (other copies have the "A" present or slipping). This volume is close to fine (the slightest of wear at the spine-head); the quite uncommon dust jacket (with the arrow in gold) is very good, with some edge-wear at the extremities (and at the front flap) and some browning of the spine, but with NO restoration of any kind. Supino A21.8.0… Read More

1925. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, [1925]. Original dark blue cloth lettered in orange. First Trade Edition, preceded only by a 500-copy limited edition. This was the third of Lewis's great novels of the decade, after MAIN STREET and BABBITT and before ELMER GANTRY and DODSWORTH. ARROWSMITH won the Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis declined the award. This is the tale of Martin Arrowsmith, medical doctor, who settles first in Wheatsylvania, South Dakota, next in Nautilus, Iowa, then in Chicago, and finally at a research clinic in New York City -- "hoping to find in altruistic research the relief he desires from publicity-seeking and money-grabbing commercial medicine" [OCAL]. But he falls out of favor when he administers his cure for a plague indiscriminately, in order to save lives, thus ruining the results of the experiment -- and ultimately winds up back in rural America, this time in Vermont. This copy is in very good condition (the usual fading of the spine, minor edge-wear, slight cracking… Read More

1907. With Numerous Illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907. 4 pp undated ads. Original light brown cloth decorated in brown and lettered in red and white. First Edition of this odd novel written several years earlier, not long after THE CALL OF THE WILD, during London's three-year "long sickness." Just as much of that novel consists of Buck's bad dreams, so in BEFORE ADAM the nameless narrator describes his strange dreams which, he asserts, are memories of a prehistoric ancestor named Big Tooth. Like Jack, the dreamer in BEFORE ADAM suffered a procession of night­mares, full of forests and horrors without end, great serpents and prowling monsters; he had lost his true primeval father, and his alien stepfather pushed him out of the treehouse where he lived with his suspicious and unprogressive mother into the tooth-and-claw world of prehistory. As an atavistic projection of Jack's distorted vision of his deprived childhood, the opening of BEFORE ADAM can… Read More

1906. London: Chapman and Hall, 1906. Original rose linen-grain cloth. First Edition, believed to have consisted of no more than 1500 copies. In 1900 Punch Magazine had asked Maugham to contribute a couple of stories, one of which was "Cupid and the Vicar of Swale." Over the next few years he converted this story in two ways: into the play LOAVES AND FISHES (written in 1902 but not performed until 1911 and not published until 1924), and into this full-length novel THE BISHOP'S APRON -- which describes Canon Spratte's campaign to wed a beer heiress and obtain a bishopric. The tone was farcical, the dialogue epigrammatic. This insipid period piece... found favor with reviewers. The Bookman in its April [1906] issue said "the whole book is an admirable blend of cynical gaiety and broadly farcical comedy; it is the smartest and most genuinely humourous novel that the season has yet given us." The Punch reviewer... said on February 21 that it was "the best clerical novel since BARCHESTER TOWERS."… Read More

1916. (Le Livre des Sans-Foyer). Original Articles in Verse and Prose / Illustrations reproduced from Original Paintings & Drawings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916. Original blue-grey paper-covered boards with tan cloth spine. First (and only) Edition, of which this is Copy No. 70 of the 125 numbered large-paper copies printed on Van Gelder paper, signed by D.B. Updike of The Merrymount Press. (In addition to 2000 trade copies, there were 175 large-paper copies -- #s 1-50 on French hand-made paper, and #s 51-175 on Van Gelder paper.) Edited and organized by Edith Wharton, this book's proceeds went to the people of Belgium and France made homeless by the Great War -- especially the child refugees from Flanders. Following an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, the literary contributors include Sarah Bernhardt, Laurence Binyon, Rupert Brooke, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Conrad ("Poland Revisited"), John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Alice Meynell, George Santayana, Igor Stravinsky, Edith… Read More

1930. London: William Heinemann, (1930). Original blue cloth, with dust jacket. First Edition of perhaps his best novel, a witty and delicious comedy of literary England in the early decades of the 20th century, told in the first person by a novelist, Ashenden. The pushing and self-advertising novelist Alroy Kear wants to get at the details of the early life of Edward Driffield, an eminent novelist whose biography Kear has been commissioned to write. Ashenden had known Driffield and his first wife Rosie, a barmaid; Rosie, the skeleton in the cupboard of Driffield's life, is Kear's stumbling block -- he is not honest enough to be given the facts that Ashenden gives the reader. Rosie is a wonderful character -- affectionate, amoral, and generous. The narrator is obviously Maugham but he denied what so many readers were quick to conclude: that Alroy Kear was founded on Hugh Walpole and Edward Driffield on Thomas Hardy. [CGEL] This copy lacks the "t" of "won't" on line 14 of p. 147, which is often… Read More

1930. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930. Original green cloth, with dust jacket. First Edition of this tale of mystery and adventure, published a month before the American. As Buchan points out in a brief prefatory note, this tale contains further exploits of Dickson McCunn and several other characters whom he had introduced in HUNTINGTOWER (1922); there would be one more Dickson McCunn novel, THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS, in 1935. This is a near-fine copy; the attractive pictorial dust jacket is just about near-fine, with quite minor soil and edge-wear. Blanchard A87.

1948. Nicoll, Gordon. A Romance. London: William Heinemann, (1948). Original red cloth lettered in silver, with dust jacket. First Edition of Maugham's last novel, published two months before the American one. Set in Spain during the Inquisition, it told of a crippled girl to whom the Blessed Virgin appears in a vision. She will be healed by one of three brothers, the one who has best served God. One brother is a bishop, another is a soldier, and the third is a baker. It comes as no surprise that the humble panadero succeeds in healing the girl... In the slackness of the writing, the descent into cliche, and the contrived plot devices, CATALINA betrayed Maugham's declining powers... [It] was a feeble book with which to end a fifty-year career as a novelist. [Morgan] This copy has its lettering in silver (the publisher started out using silver but finding it unsatisfactory switched to imitation gold -- "both variations were delivered to the bookshops simultaneously"). It is a fine, bright copy; the… Read More

1914. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1914. Original navy blue cloth decorated in gilt. First American Edition, fifth and last 1914 impression (NOT so identified -- but per Supino and per Cagle, the fifth has no border around the title page, and its half-title does bear the ship device). This was the work that revived Conrad's fortunes, hitting it big after almost a decade of underwhelming reception by the public. The volume's condition is just about fine (a trace of rubbing at the corner tips). See Supino A17.14.0 note, and Cagle 17b(2). Provenance: the front free endpaper and half-title bear the personal blind-stamp of American author Zane Grey -- indicating a volume that came from his estate.

1913. Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, n.d. [1913]. 31 pp Methuen ads dated July 1913. Original green cloth with spine decorated in gilt. First Edition, first printing, Canadian issue -- which consisted of just 315 copies issued by early November 1913. CHANCE's first edition has a complex history. In early September 1913, Methuen had 3021 copies printed, 1956 of which were supplied with domestic preliminary leaves dated 1913; however, only 51 of these copies were actually bound up and issued before a binder's strike delayed further domestic distribution (these 51 copies now command over $3,000 apiece). The other 1900+ domestic copies were given cancel title pages dated 1914, and were not issued until mid-January of that year. Meanwhile the other 1065 copies (3021 minus 1956) were scheduled by Methuen to go to foreign markets: 315 for Canada, plus 750 for the colonies. The 315 copies, specially bound in the U.K. for Bell & Cockburn of Toronto, were received by Methuen on 17 September 1913, were shipped… Read More

1913. [one of 150 pre-publication 1913 copies] Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913. Original dark blue cloth with front cover vignette in gilt. First American Edition, first impression, pre-publication state (with the integral title page dated 1913). Doubleday Page had an estimated 5,000 copies printed in September 1913, but the London publisher Methuen then told them that the book could not be published until 1914 (due to a binder's strike in England); Methuen had allowed only 51 English copies with an integral 1913 title page to reach the public. As for Doubleday Page, "Because of the uncertainty of English publication date, and still hoping, despite the delay, to meet its fall publication schedule, Doubleday Page ordered approximately 150 copies of the first impression bound with a 1913 title-page date to be used for copyright, advance, and review copy purposes" [Supino]. The rest of the first impression, not yet bound, was equipped with new preliminary pages dated 1914 and was not… Read More

1914. [the Quinn / Doubleday copy] London: Methuen & Co., (1913) [sic]. 8 pp ads dated Autumn 1913. Original green cloth decorated in gilt. First Edition, first published state (Supino's "State C"), of the novel that revived Conrad's career, a popular smash after about a decade without one. Conrad had been working on it since 1906. It was the success of CHANCE that caused many of his earlier books to be reprinted. The "first published state" is any of the first three impressions that has a cancel title leaf: quoting from Supino, "Because 4051 copies of the first three impressions were furnished with cancels, it is not possible to determine to which of the first three impressions any of the various states belong." (Supino goes on to list States "A" through "H" of copies of the first published state, each with various differences -- with "F" and "G" reading "Second Edition" and "H" reading "Third Edition.") State "C", as here, has a cancel title leaf reading "First Published in 1913" on the title… Read More

1914. [the John Quinn copy] London: Methuen & Co., (1914). 8 pp ads dated Autumn 1913. Original green cloth decorated in gilt. First Edition, first published state (Supino's "State B"), of the novel that revived Conrad's career, a popular smash after about a decade without one. Conrad had been working on it since 1906. It was the success of CHANCE that caused many of his earlier works to be reprinted. The "first published state" is any of the first three impressions that has a cancel title leaf: quoting from Supino, "Because 4051 copies of the first three impressions were furnished with cancels, it is not possible to determine to which of the first three impressions any of the various states belong." Supino goes on to list States "A" through "H" of the first published state, each with various differences -- with "F" and "G" reading "Second Edition" and with "H" reading "Third Edition." This copy is in Supino's "State B" (with a cancel title leaf dated 1914 on its verso, withOUT closing quotation… Read More

1913. Concluding with The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, (1913). Original dark green cloth with monogram device in gilt. First (American) Edition, published simultaneously with the English one. To quote from Hardy's prefatory note, this is a collection of "for what they may be worth, a dozen minor novels" that had previously appeared only in periodicals -- between 1881 and 1900, before Hardy had forsaken fiction for verse. It constitutes Hardy's last major volume of prose. The American edition, which in our experience is scarcer than the English one, has as a frontispiece a Reinhart illustration from "The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid," where the English edition has a photogravure of Maiden Castle. This is a fine, bright copy (very faint discoloration on the rear cover). Purdy pp 156-7.

1907. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1907. Original tan cloth pictorially decorated in black, white and green. First Separate Edition (being one of the "other stories" that had been published with THE GREEN FLAG in 1900); before that (in October-December 1899), it had appeared in The Strand Magazine with 16 Sidney Paget illustrations. Doyle brought his much-loved sport of boxing into a number of his works, such as his novel RODNEY STONE and this tale. A young Welsh medical student enters the boxing ring, in the hope of winning the funds necessary to establish his own practice. The tale appeared on the screen in 1921, as a British silent film. Included is a color frontispiece of a prizefighter. This is a close-to-fine copy, with no cover soil and with much-less-than-usual flaking of the white cover panel -- both of which are usually major problems with this book. Green & Gibson A31a.

1901. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901. Original dark grey-green paper-covered boards decorated in gilt. First Edition of Edith Wharton's second collection of short stories; this volume includes seven, all appearing in book form for the first time. This was her third volume of fiction, following THE GREATER INCLINATION (1899, stories) and THE TOUCHSTONE (1900, a novella). The seven items in CRUCIAL INSTANCES are so clearly inferior to the best of THE GREATER INCLINATION that it has even been speculated that Edith Wharton had written them some years earlier and had dragged them out of her drawer in the winter of 1901 to meet contractual obligations. In fact, they were all written... after THE TOUCHSTONE -- in 1900 and 1901 [Lewis]. This copy is in grey-green paper-covered boards, elaborately gilt, while others are in red cloth; there is no priority, but it is much tougher to find these paper-covered copies in decent shape. This is a bright, close-to-fine copy, with very little of the edge-wear… Read More