Search Results: Titles starting with L from Sumner & Stillman

1923. London: Martin Secker, (1923). Original brown cloth lettered in gilt, with dust jacket. First Edition of this collection of three novellas, published eight months before Seltzer's American edition that was titled THE CAPTAIN'S DOLL: Three Novelettes. All three involve relationships during (and affected by) the waning months of the Great War, then just five years earlier... "The years 1916 and 1917 were the years when the old spirit died for ever in England. But Lady Beveridge struggled on. She was being beaten... Society was beginning to jeer at this little worn bird of an out-of-date righteousness and aesthetic. [from the second page of "The Ladybird"]." This volume is in fine condition; the dust jacket, unclipped, is very good-plus (its spine browned as usual, minor wear at the spine ends; there is a faint vertical crease in the top half of the front panel, a feature we have seen before and thus perhaps a production flaw). This jacket is quite uncommon. Roberts A24a. Housed in a cloth… Read More

1926. With an Introduction by Richard Curle. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. Original dark blue cloth, with dust jacket. First American Edition of this posthumous collection of twenty essays, most of which had previously appeared in England in limited pamphlet form. In our experience the American edition of LAST ESSAYS is considerably scarcer than the English one. This is a fine copy; the dust jacket, which bears a portrait of Conrad (and the verso of which bears a large ad for Kipling's works) is also fine -- and quite uncommon thus. Supino A27.2.0; Keating 202.

1877. An Old-Fashioned Love Story. By the Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1877. 7 pp undated ads. Original blue cloth decorated in black. First Edition (following serialization in Good Words in the latter half of 1876). This tale involves a governess who must wait seventeen years for the man she loves to return to her. This is a near-fine copy, slightly rubbed at the binding extremities. Not in Sadleir; Wolff 4998.

1805. [inscribed by Scott] The Second Edition. London: printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, and A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh, by James Ballantyne, Edinburgh, 1805. Original blue paper-covered boards, with later (but period-style) white cloth or vellum, with printed spine label. "The Second Edition," which consisted of 1500 copies, issued later in the same year as the 750-copy first printing. This narrative poem in six cantos, with the action taking place in mid-16th-Century Scotland, is quite "early Scott": in the exhaustive Todd & Bowden bibliography, this is the 14th of 259 titles, and it would be 1814 before Scott would venture into prose fiction -- first with WAVERLEY, followed by such titles as ROB ROY, IVANHOE, KENILWORTH and QUENTIN DURWARD. Remarkably, this copy is still in the original blue paper-covered boards, the endpapers are original, and the leaves are still uncut; however the spine and label -- though period-style -- are later (but not at all recent). Condition is… Read More

1915. [Chicago:] The Chicago Little Theatre, 1915. Original pictorial wrappers. First Edition of Rupert Brooke's only play, considered (by Keynes among others) to have consisted of only 200 copies. Before the war young Brooke wrote this play, never expecting it to be performed (a stranger gets lost in rural Lithuania and stops for the night at a hut where there's this farmer's daughter...). However it was in fact produced at The Chicago Little Theatre, and this booklet was published, in October 1915 (six months after Brooke had died of sepsis while part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force en route to Gallipoli). This experimental art theatre had been founded in 1912 by the British poet Maurice Browne and his wife Ellen Van Volkenburg (the American actress "Nelly Van"); they had been encouraged to do so by Lady Augusta Gregory, and thus tried to model it after Dublin's Abbey Theatre. Forty-four plays would be produced in its tiny fourth-floor quarters (25 of them American premieres). Theodore… Read More

1903. An Awful Warning to Bad Babas. By the Author of "Little Black Mingo" and "Little Black Quibba." London: James Nisbet & Co., 1903. Original light olive cloth illustrated in black and printed in red. First Edition of the most unusual, and one of the least-known, of Helen Bannerman's eight small-format books for children. Five of the eight were about "black" children (though they were really about native Tamils in the region of southern India where Helen Bannerman lived) -- usually outwitting fierce animals that threatened them: LITTLE BLACK SAMBO (1899), LITTLE BLACK MINGO (1901), LITTLE BLACK QUIBBA (1902), LITTLE BLACK QUASHA (1908) and LITTLE BLACK BOBTAIL (1909). Her other three were this one, PAT AND THE SPIDER (1905) and THE TEASING MONKEY (1907). LITTLE DEGCHIE-HEAD (a "degchie" is a large handle-less pot frequently used in Indian cuisine) is about a little (white) girl named Mary who despite warnings from her mother, cannot resist poking at fires; one day she falls into the fire and… Read More

1916. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916. 6 pp undated ads. Original blue cloth pictorially decorated in black, white and orange. First Edition of this tale about a love triangle on a large ranch. Though not published until the year of Jack's death, he had written this during his bad year of 1913. He spent much of that year visiting a dentist, finally having all of his upper teeth pulled to halt the pyorrhea raging in his gums; at about the same time, his Wolf House burned down two weeks before its completion; and his kidney problems continued to worsen, exacerbated by his drinking and his insistence upon eating raw fish and duck -- "Jack persisted in gobbling underdone flesh as if he were a wolf." [The novel] was meant to exalt the splendor of Wolf House and scientific farming and sex. "It is all sex, from start to finish --" he wrote to the editor of Cosmopolitan, "in which no sexual adventure is actually achieved or comes within a million miles of being achieved, and in which, nevertheless, is… Read More

1900. [still in unbound gatherings] New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1900. Original light green cloth decorated in dark green. First American Edition of what is arguably Conrad's greatest work. This copy has the title page in the second and usual (cancelled) state: at the time this was being published, Doubleday & McClure was dividing into two entities (Doubleday Page and McClure Phillips), with uncertainty as to which firm would retain the rights to LORD JIM. Thus, in the first (integral) state the copyright is "1900 by Doubleday, Page & Co.", while in the cancelled state the copyright is "1899 and 1900 by Joseph Conrad." Supino A5.11.0; Cagle A5b(2). This is a curious incompletely-bound copy, consisting of the complete casing (the usual decorated light green cloth stamped in dark green, glued onto the boards and backstrip), PLUS all 25 separate folded sheets (gatherings -- each sheet containing 16 pages of text). The gatherings have NOT been stitched together, their edges have NOT been trimmed,… Read More

1894. London: Chapman and Hall, 1894. Original olive green cloth decorated in black. First Edition of Meredith's last three-decker novel, which consisted of 1,500 copies -- published, in fact, in the final year of the three-volume format, as the lending libraries had finally lost their decades-long control over the publishing of English fiction. The next year would see Meredith's last multi-volume novel, THE AMAZING MARRIAGE in two volumes, which would carry through with the same topic as LORD ORMONT -- that a woman should be free to leave a marriage in which her husband does not consider her to be an equal partner. This set is in fine condition -- one bumped fore-corner, some foxing on the (intact) original endpapers caused by the binder's glue, but essentially no other wear nor soil. The spine gilt is not at all worn, but we have never seen a copy of this title with what we could call gleaming gilt. Collie XIV; Sadleir 1699; Wolff 4740.

1894. London: Chapman and Hall, 1894. Original olive green cloth decorated in black. First Edition of Meredith's last three-decker novel, which consisted of 1,500 copies -- published, in fact, in the final year of the three-volume format, as the lending libraries had finally lost their decades-long control over the publishing of English fiction. The next year would see Meredith's last multi-volume novel, THE AMAZING MARRIAGE in two volumes, which would carry through with the same topic as LORD ORMONT -- that a woman should be free to leave a marriage in which her husband does not consider her to be an equal partner. This set is in close-to-fine condition -- very light rubbing on some edges, but essentially no other wear nor soil. The spine gilt is intact but we have never seen a copy of this title with what we could call gleaming gilt. Collie XIV; Sadleir 1699; Wolff 4740. Provenance: each front free endpaper bears the penciled signature "Simon Nowell-Smith | July 1936" -- the bibliophile and author… Read More

1871. Or, The Adventures of a Young Gentleman in Search of a Religion. By Mr. Benjamins (Bret Harte...). London: John Camden Hotten, n.d. [1871]. 2 pp preliminary ads plus 8 pp terminal ads dated "for 1872." Original glazed printed wrappers. First Separate Edition of this parody of Benjamin Disraeli's 1870 novel LOTHAIR. It was in 1871 that the new edition of Harte's CONDENSED NOVELS came out in the U.S., which added two new parodies (including this one) to the fifteen that had appeared in the original 1867 edition. Blanck (citing Kozlay) notes three states of this book, and this copy does not quite equate with any of the three: the inside front wrapper lists "The New Books of Humour" (not cited at all by Blanck, though it could be his State 2); the outside rear wrapper promotes Bryant & May's Patent Safety Matches (as in Blanck's State 3). This copy is in good-to-very good condition, which is not bad for such a fragile, ephemeral piece: the spine wrapper is mostly perished, and there is other… Read More

1907. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907. 4 pp undated ads. Original dark blue cloth decorated in gilt and cream. First Edition, consisting of 7,973 copies, of this collection of eight tales. He needed the money badly, for he had overspent his income to satisfy his various desires. As well as paying for his ranch and his growing number of dependents, he was beginning to squander a fortune on building a boat called the "Snark" for his seven years' voyage... He returned to panning out a living from Alaska in the stories collected in a volume with "Love of Life." His confidence in his own tenacity was shown in that extraordinary story of man's will to survive at all costs. Yet the instability of his long sickness also appeared in "The Sun-Dog Trail." In that underestimated story of a man and woman bent on vengeance against another man, the reason for action is hidden, and the white silence of the north is as ambiguous as it is murderous... Reality and appearance, willpower and dream, are all… Read More

1839. London: Charles Tilt, 1839. 8 pp undated ads. Original dark green cloth wrappers pictorially decorated in gilt. First Edition, first issue, of this unusual collaboration between Thackeray, Dickens and Cruikshank. The volume consists of 31 quatrains of amusing verse, illustrated with Cruikshank's eleven full-page etchings (as well as the front cover design). According to Van Duzer, "It is now generally conceded that Thackeray wrote the text and that the notes and preface were by Dickens." For Thackeray it was quite early work: it was only the preceding year that was published THE YELLOWPLUSH CORRESPONDENCE, the "first publication in book form of any of Thackeray's writings" [Parrish]. As for Dickens, this fell just after OLIVER TWIST, at about the time NICHOLAS NICKLEBY was being serialized. Cruikshank, the only one of the three identified in the book, was the veteran of the group. This copy is of the first issue, with "wine" in stanza v; in the second issue this was changed to "vine" (even… Read More

1899. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899. Original olive-green cloth decorated and embossed in gilt. First Edition of this early title by this African-American poet whose parents, before they met, had both been Kentucky slaves; his father escaped to Canada, and wound up fighting in the Civil War for the Massachusetts 55th Regiment; his mother escaped to Ohio. Dunbar was born and raised in Dayton, where at Central High School (Class of 1890) he would be the only black student, the president of the literary society, and the editor of the school newspaper; one of his classmates was Orville Wright who, shortly after his mother died, would drop out of school before graduating -- to devote time to his fledgling printing business, and then (1892) to his and brother Wilbur's new bicycle business. Dunbar's first book (published as a favor by Orville's father) came out in 1893; by the time this book came out, he was already ill with the tuberculosis that would claim his life seven years later, at age 33.… Read More

1844. .. [in the original cloth] With Illustrations by Phiz. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844. Original blind-stamped diagonally-ribbed blue cloth. First Edition in book form, published immediately at the conclusion of the 20-in-19 monthly serial parts (issued from January 1843 through July 1844). MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT marks Dickens's return to conventional serial parts, with separate plates, followed by a single octavo volume (as with NICHOLAS NICKLEBY in 1839); since then, he had tried weekly parts composed of a single illustrated folded sheet (MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK, consisting of both THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP and BARNABY RUDGE, published all-together in book form in three oversized volumes). CHUZZLEWIT was the first of Dickens's novels to lose readers during serialization; when the publisher Hall accordingly suggested Dickens's fees should be reduced (though it never happened), it created a rift that was not bridged until Chapman and Hall published A TALE OF TWO CITIES in 1859. Included are the forty… Read More

1844. With Illustrations by Phiz. New-York: published by Harper & Brothers, 1844. 2 preliminary pages of undated ads. Original vertically-ribbed blind-stamped purple-brown cloth. Very early American edition (second, by five days). While the UK edition was being published in 20-in-19 monthly serial parts, Harper published the novel in seven serial parts (six consisting of three UK parts each, followed by the seventh consisting of Part 19/20) -- issued irregularly between March 1843 and July 1844. Harper's final part was issued on July 22nd, and three days later (the 25th) they came out with the same leaves bound in cloth (as here), priced at $1.00 -- containing the same 14 plates, in seven facing pairs as had appeared serially. But J. Winchester of New York, after running the novel serially in his monthly "The New World" magazine, came out with his edition, bound in wrappers and with no illustrations, on July 20th -- priced at just 25 cents, which Winchester proudly proclaimed to be "the cheapest… Read More

1912. London: Ernest Nister, n.d. [1912]. Original color-pictorial paper-covered boards with blue-grey cloth spine. Early appearance of this Henty tale, in this Nister book for children, printed in Bavaria. Nister had already included "Little Mistress Valentia" in his IN THE CHIMNEY CORNER of 1899 and in his Holiday Annual of 1905; this is its third appearance. Very curiously for an author then so famous, Henty's name does not appear on the title page -- though four other contributors do, including G. Manville Fenn and L. T. Meade. This copy does not have ads printed on the rear endpaper (some do -- no known priority); those ads cite the 25th Nister's Holiday Annual, which came out in late 1912 -- thus dating this volume. This is a very good-plus copy, with less than the usual amount of soil and edge-wear. PASTIME TALES is generally regarded as one of the scarcest of Henty's Nister appearances -- often overlooked, due to there being no hint of him on the binding or title page. Newbolt 169.1… Read More