Search Results: Authors starting with P from Honey & Wax Booksellers

London: Printed by G.P. for William Cooke [but privately printed by J. Moyes for Amos Strettell], 1820. Publisher's presentation copy of this nineteenth-century reissue of Martin Parker's 1632 ballad of Philomela, inspired by Book Six of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Parker was a prolific balladeer under Charles I, publishing popular broadsides and chapbooks, with a penchant for "moralistic tales of inconstant men and long-suffering or patient women" (ODNB). Styling himself "the Nightingale's Secretary," Martin tells the story of Philomela's rape, mutilation, and revenge from her own perspective: "Then let your minds suppose that you doe heare / A virgin ravish and depriv'd of tongue, / For so the nightingale that sings so cleare, / Was once, as Ovid long agoe hath sung." By the early nineteenth century, only one copy of Parker's 1632 first edition was known to survive, in the possession of book collector Amos Strettell, who arranged for the printing of this type facsimile in an edition of 27 copies.… Read More

Carrboro, North Carolina: Truck Press, 1976. Signed first edition of West Virginia writer Jayne Anne Phillips's Pushcart Prize-winning debut, published when she was 24 years old in an unnumbered edition of 400 copies. A collection of short prose fragments, Sweethearts unfolds in a run-down Southern landscape of great natural beauty and pervasive menace: "Six girls giggly drunk jumping out to run circles around an old Chevy at a red light. Hey wait a minute Honey, you dropped somethin. I keep dropping how things went." Many of the pieces in Sweethearts would reappear in Black Tickets (1979), Phillips's first story collection from a major publisher. The book is accompanied by an original broadside advertising a reading by Phillips on June 8, 1976, at the Bull's Head Bookshop at the University of North Carolina. A near-fine signed pair. Single volume, measuring 10.75 x 6.75 inches: [60]. Original buff photographic wrappers printed in black and sepia, blue endleaves, title page printed in blue and black,… Read More

London: T. Cadell, 1778. First edition of this ambitious eighteenth-century traveler's guide, an alphabetical table of over two thousand European painters, giving the dates, birthplaces, favorite subjects, and influences of each, from Andrea Abate (a Neapolitan painter of fruit) to Lambert Zustrus (a disciple of Titian). The guide is intended "to instruct (as well as to assist the Memory of) those Gentlemen and Connoisseurs, who either travel Abroad for the Improvement of their Taste, or intend to view the curious Collections in their Kingdoms." A very good artifact of the glory days of the Grand Tour. Octavo in fours, measuring 8 x 5.25 inches: [124]. Nineteenth-century calf spine, marbled paper boards, raised bands, spine compartments ruled in gilt, grey morocco spine label lettered in gilt. One page of publisher's advertisements at rear. Light occasional foxing, heavier to final signatures; lightest shelfwear to binding.

New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845. First edition in book form of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," the single most famous American poem of the nineteenth century, first published earlier that year in the New York Evening Mirror (under Poe's own name) and The American Review (under a pseudonym). Partly inspired by the early lyrics of Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning), to whom he dedicated this volume of poems, Poe composed "The Raven" in trochaic octometer, with a deranged musicality all his own. The elements are familiar even to those who don't read poetry: the "midnight dreary," the silk-curtained chamber, the raven perched upon the bust of Athena, the relentless refrain that drives the narrator mad. "'Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! / Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door! / Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!' / Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'" Even before publication, Poe knew he had a sensation on his hands. When… Read More

Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835. First book appearance of Edgar Allan Poe's "Manuscript Found in a Bottle," first published in 1833 as the winner of a story contest in the pages of The Baltimore Daily Visiter, and later collected in Poe's 1840 Tales of the Grotesque. Poe's chilling tale of a trapped sailor drifting toward the South Pole is a classic of American horror: "a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge, -- some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction." In addition to Poe, this Philadelphia gift annual features work by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Washington Irving, Lydia Sigourney, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, and William Gilmore Simms, and is edited by "Miss Leslie." BAL 16126. A very good copy. Octavo, measuring 6 x 3.75 inches: x, [3], 18-292. Full crimson publisher's morocco signed… Read More

London: E. Newbery, 1794. First and only edition of this anthology dedicated to "the martial and heroic stile of our ancient Bards," featuring early English and Scots ballads, a selection of medieval and early modern verse (some Arthurian), and later poems written in imitation of traditional styles. Highlights include a series of folk songs quoted by Shakespeare, poems written by Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh, and James Grainger's modern West Indian ballad, "Bryan and Pereene," which features an unintentionally comic shark attack off St. Kitt's: "Then through the white surf did she haste, / To clasp her lovely swain: / When, ah! A shark bit through his waste: / His heart's blood dy'd the main!" Roscoe A26. A curious and compelling poetic miscellany, in a handsome contemporary binding. Twelvemo, measuring 5 x 3 inches: [2], xii, 204. Contemporary tree calf, spine ruled and decorated in gilt, red morocco spine label, boards decoratively ruled in gilt, blue-green marbled endpapers. Engraved pictorial… Read More