Search Results: Titles starting with R from Honey & Wax Booksellers

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

London and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. First American edition, and first English translation, of Isaac Babel's Cossack stories, based on his military service during the 1920 Russian invasion of Poland. Born into a struggling Jewish merchant family in Odessa, Babel was an observer and outsider all his life, a target of religious prejudice and political suspicion. With Maxim Gorky's encouragement, he began to publish fiction shortly before the revolution. In 1920, Babel was assigned to Budyonny's cavalry during the Russo-Polish War, a brutal experience that inspired the stories of Red Cavalry: "a monstrous and inconceivable Russia tramped on either side of the carriages in bast shoes, like a multitude of bugs swarming in clothes. . . . it jumped on the steps of our train and fell back, knocked down by the butt-ends of our rifles; it snorted and scrabbled and flowed on in silence. At the twelfth verst, when I had no potatoes left I flung Trotsky's leaflets at them." Babel's stories were widely… Read More

London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1878. First edition of Thomas Hardy's sixth novel, one of 1000 copies. Set amid the wild landscape of Egdon Heath, the tension between two unhappy couples, pulled together and then apart, produces the mounting sense of dread so characteristic of Hardy's later fiction: "To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious situations along the whole course between the beginning of a passion and its end." First issue, with the closing quotation mark around 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' dropped on the title page of Volume I. Purdy, 24-27. A near-fine copy. Three volumes, measuring 7.5 x 5 inches: [6], 303, [1]; [6], 297, [3]; [6], 320. Original brown cloth stamped in black and blind, spines decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt and black; cream-coated endpapers. Frontispiece map, after a drawing by Hardy, facing title page in Volume I; two pages of publisher's advertisements at end of… Read More

London: John Wilkie, 1775. First edition, the Rosenbach copy, of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's great stage comedy The Rivals, first performed at Covent Garden in January 1775. The plot turns on the young heiress Lydia Languish, whose addiction to romance novels leads her to expect high drama from her suitors: "I thought we were coming to the prettiest distress imaginable . . . There had I projected one of the most sentimental elopements! - so becoming a disguise! - so amiable a ladder of Ropes!" Lydia's easily confused guardian Mrs. Malaprop, who continually mistakes one word for another, would inspire a new literary term in English, "malapropism." ESTC T45136. First issue, with the catchword EPI- on the final page signaling that the Epilogue is to follow; the Epilogue actually appears here after the Prologue, with the Errata and Dramatis Personae. Page 79 correctly numbered. This copy belonged to the great American book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach (1876-1952), who helped build the collections of Henry… Read More

Madison, Wisconsin: Dangling Participle Press, 1998. First edition of this dreamlike artist's book about travel, memory, and storytelling, "a search for what connects people," number 33 of 35 signed copies printed and bound by Matt Eberle at his Dangling Participle Press. Rudy & Midge was inspired by a collection of midcentury travel ephemera found at an estate sale. The densely collaged pages retrace the adventures of the unknown Rudy and Midge, represented in blurred outline, as they make their way from Havana to Mexico City, San Francisco to Florida and Ireland. Their story, captured in layers of letters, souvenirs, and photographs, is intertwined with the artist's memories of his own grandparents and the trauma of the Kennedy assassination. "The arrival of Oswald" looms over Rudy and Midge's carefree travels from the very beginning of the book: "all of the dates on the vacation receipts and travel brochures abruptly end in 1963." In the colophon, Eberle reveals that he later learned that Midge… Read More