Search Results: Titles starting with S from ReadInk

Shelburne (Ontario)/Sauk City WI: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. Near Fine in Fine dj. 1998. First Edition. Hardcover. [both the book and jacket are in as-new condition, the book blemished only by the presence of the previous owner's initials plus date & place of purchase, in ink along the edge of the rear pastedown (concealed beneath the jacket flap)]. A Sherlock Holmes mystery, set in 1895. When a Cardinal, a personal confidant of Pope Leo XIII, mysteriously disappears while attending a monks' retreat at St. Boniface Abbey. Holmes and Watson are brought into the case by Inspector Lestrade, and Holmes is hired by the Pope himself to find the missing Cardinal. "This bizarre and shocking mystery caused Pope Leo XIII to confiscate Watson's manuscript and bury it in the Vatican vaults. Only now, a century later, can this gruesome story be revealed." .

Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1983. First Edition. Hardcover. 0868500623 . [very slight wear at ends of spine, otherwise tight and clean; ditto the jacket, with just some light surface-scratching to the rear panel]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the ffep: "To ________ & ______ / with affection / Jac"; also dated in the year of publication. Two novellas set in Sophiatown, a Johannesburg suburb which was once a vibrant center of black culture, but which under apartheid (still the law of the land in South Africa at the time of this volume's publication) had "been bulldozed into the ground to make way for the soulless symmetry of a new white suburb, Triomf" (after its non-white residents had been forcibly removed and relocated to various settlements and townships, of course). "A Daisy-Guts Cocktail" is a "tale of gangsters, shebeen queens, murderers, bank robbers, wayward spirits and strangely gifted… Read More

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co.. Very Good in Poor dj. 1945. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . [solid copy, moderate shelfwear, mild soiling/spotting to cloth; jacket heavily worn, large chips along bottom edge, jagged chip (about 1"x1/2") at top left of front panel (miraculously not affecting any text)]. "Against a background of the Carolina countryside unfolds this novel of family life filled with youth and touching romance." .

New York: A. L. Burt Company. Very Good- in Very Good dj. (c.1932). Reprint. Hardcover. [solid copy, square and tight, moderate shelfwear, some soiling/spotting to page edges; attractive pictorial jacket shows some wear at edges and corners, moderate soiling visible due to light-colored background, one tiny chip at top of front panel]. "A vivid story of the last of the cattle barons and his rip-roaring cowboy band of nomadic riders so fast disappearing." .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Good. 1922. 1st (U.S.) edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [solid enough book with binding intact, but should be considered a reading copy only due to external wear and bumping, an unsightly beverage-ring scar on the front cover (see scan), and internal tape repait to a page that had been ripped in half]. Uncommon novel, originally published in France in 1921. It's "historical fiction" in a sense, but as the New York Times described it in 1922, "it is not a history of Salt Lake City as occupied by the Mormons so much as the story of the mental and physical anguish of a young widow who is unsuspectingly drawn into marriage with a Mormon and finds herself the second wife -- one of three wives, and perhaps others." A stage adaptation was presented in Paris in 1926, about which the Times correspondent commented that the playwright "obviously knows very little about Utah and the history of the Mormons and Mormonism and was forced to… Read More

New York: E.P. Dutton and Company. Very Good. (c.1918). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [modest wear to book extremities, light dust-soiling and age-toning to edges of text block]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "To Arthur F. Kales -- / with whom I share / many happy memories / of undergraduate life. / Affectionately / Charles G. Norris / Camp Dix, N.J. / June 1918." Norris's second novel, the tale of a young man's troubled passage through the American education system and into his working life. Per critic Richard Allan Davison (in DLB 9), the book's "depictions of the lack of academic rigor in midwestern universities in the pre-World War I period, replete with cheating, college pranks, fraternity rushing and initiation, and social conformity, are masterly." (Weirdly, though, the book doesn't even rate a mention in John O. Lyons's study "The College Novel in America," perhaps because that's not… Read More

Philadelphia/New York: J.B. Lippincott Company. Very Good. (c.1938). First American Edition. Hardcover. (gray decorated cloth; no dust jacket) [good solid copy, slight fraying to cloth at spine ends, light stain at top of fore-edge]. Third novel in the long-running "Baron" series, which eventually spanned nearly fifty books and inspired a short-lived 1960s TV series. According to the copyright page the original British title of the book was "Salute the Baron!" (and it was indeed published years later, in various editions, as "Salute for the Baron"), but in this instance the publisher made an error: it was actually first published in the U.K. as "The Baron Again" (this title confirmed through a search of the British Library catalogue). .

Bognor Regis (U.K.): New Horizon. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. (c.1983). First Edition. Hardcover. 0861167325 . [faint smudging to fore-edge, very slight bump to bottom rear corner; jacket shows a bit of wear and minor wrinkling along top edge]. A novel of the international oil business. "Wealthy clients induce Vic Pace, an unconventional oil finder, to survey the oil deficient Republic of South Africa. Pace sees megabuck Trilateralist bankers are poised to rape to country for its mineral treasures. He must find oil or doom blacks and whites to suffer the green of ruthless salvagers." According to his jacket-blurb bio, the author was "the sole, world-wide licensee of a geomicrobiological hydrocarbon process, patented and owned by a major multi-national energy corporation to directly locate oil deposits." (Does tha make him "an unconventional oil finder," like his protagonist? I suspect it does.) .

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company. Good in Very Good+ dj. (c.1924). First Edition. Hardcover. [a good sound copy with only modest shelfwear -- but NOT that there is considerable pencil underlining throughout text; it would be erasable, but only with a lot of effort]. "A sane and valuable contribution to our knowledge in a difficult yet vitally important field -- that of sex-education for girls and young woman." As stated in the Preface, the objective of the author's research, carried out under the auspices of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, was "to discover the actual state of sexual knowledge of young women of more than average education." To this end 160 girls between the ages of 17 and 23 were surveyed, via an extensive questionnaire (almost 900 questions). PLEASE NOTE that there is extensive pencil underlining throughout the text, and additional pencil notes on the rear endpapers. .

Tokyo: Ogawa Art Foundation. Fine in Fine dj. 1990. First Edition. Stiff wraps. (glassine-wrapped stiff covers (not a dust jacket per se), in original cardboard case with hinged die-cut cover flap (i.e. not an open-ended slipcase)) [every element in Fine, unworn condition]. (47 numbered color plates) Catalogue issued in conjunction with a 1990 exhibition of Francis's works; reproduces 47 works in full color, six of which are in double fold-out pages. The same organization had mounted a Francis exhibition just three years before, the catalogue for which was issued in an identical format; featuring just 40 works, that catalogue seems to be relatively common, whereas no copies of this 1990 edition can be detected in the online marketplace at this time (May 2020) . Because the introductory text is in Japanese only, I can't tell if this is an expanded/updated version of that earlier catalogue, or a completely new work; the chronology in the back of the book is in both English and… Read More

Jefferson NC/London: McFarland & Company, Inc.. Very Good+. (c.1994). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, as issued) [some bright-pink highlighting on two pages of the Introduction, otherwise as new]. (B&W photographs) All that the subtitle says, regarding this "singular figure in the history of motion pictures." Contains a 50-page interview with Fuller, conducted during his 1980s "exile" in Paris (probably circa 1989, since the first two of his final three films as a director are briefly discussed), followed by a critical discussion of his films and a "Working with Fuller" section that presents excerpts from interviews with Vincent Price, Gene Evans, Richard Widmark, Robert Stack, Joseph Biroc, Gene Fowler Jr., Constance Towers, Adam Greenberg, Karl Lewis Miller, and Larry Cohen. Appendix A discusses the director's novels (although somewhat disappointingly, as the author admits to being unable to track down copies of Fuller's first… Read More

Portsmouth NH: Heinemann. Near Fine. (c.1994). First Edition. Softcover. [virtually as-new, with just incidental wear at a couple of corners]. Trade PB (caricature drawings) A compilation of the author/illustrator's caricature drawings in various realms of the performing arts, primarily the New York theatre, from the 1940s into the 1990s, accompanied by his reminiscences of the individuals and events depicted. Norkin's theatrical illustrations -- for which he wrote his own captions, as he explains in his introduction -- were a regular feature in the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1956 (as well as appearing in numerous other publications), and he covered the performing arts for the (New York) Daily News for another 26 years after that. Although much-honored and respected, Norkin never achieved the level of broad public recognition as his contemporary Al Hirschfeld, to whose work his bears a strong resemblance (which is not to imply or impute any inferiority to either).… Read More

Warszawa [Warsaw]: Oficyna Wydawnicza Szczepan Szymanski. Near Fine. 1994. First Edition. Hardcover. 8386469048 . (laminated boards; no dust jacket, probably as issued) [minor shelfwear only]. (B&W and color photographs) The author (1923-2007) was a minor Polish actor, but a prolific Hollywood correspondent for various Polish publications. As the book's photographs -- almost exclusively of the "here I am with Celebrity X" variety -- attest, he managed to finagle access to some of Hollywood's top names, scoring (presumably) exclusive interviews, which are presented here in POLISH TRANSLATION. His subjects included: Hal Roach, Pola Negri, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda ("Henry'ego Fondy"), Evelyn Keyes, Gregory Peck, John Gielgud, George Cukor, Harry Wolf, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Telly Savalas, Jimmy Stewart, Billy Wilder, Milton Krasner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Robert Wise, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Peter Falk, Mel Brooks, Rick Baker,… Read More

New York: Duffield & Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice copy, spine slightly turned, top edge dust-soiled, tiny smudge at bottom edge, slight fading to cloth at top of spine to match missing pieces of dj; jacket is generally clean and attractive, with only minor wear at a couple of corners, but has a large-ish chip at upper left-hand corner of front panel, which also causes a bit of paper loss at top of spine (not affecting any text)]. The author, a member of an "old Philadelphia family," here presents "a drama of modern life." Its heroine, Lila Stanward, is "divorced from a millionaire husband, and emotionally and spiritually alien to her typical Philadelphia family [and she] sets out on the highroad of magnificent adventure, which is to lead her through scandal and apparent failure to a startling success." The climax unfolds in a "pastoral Maine setting." (++) .

London: The Reprint Society. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1952-1953. Reprint. Hardcover. [a nice-looking set, minor wear only to books and jackets]. An attractive set of this 3-volume biography of Pepys, the individual volumes originally published in 1933, 1935 and 1938. Wikipedia notes that this study of Pepys was published "long before the definitive edition of the diary, but, thanks to Bryant's lively style, it is still of interest." NOTE that the first volume (The Man in the Making) is stated to be a later printing (1952) of the reprint originally issued in 1949. .

New York: Hastings House. Very Good+. 1947. Revised 2nd Edition. Hardcover. (gray cloth; no dust jacket) [good sound copy, minor shelfwear, one-time owner's name at top of ffep, a list of 18 notable Bay Area names written in ink on a rear endpaper; there is also a thin line of some kind of schmutz stuck to the rear cover, apparently the residue of something that was once stuck to the book]. (American Guide Series) Series (B&W photographs, maps) A thoroughgoing historical/cultural/geographical/architectural portrait of the San Francisco Bay Area, including not just the city itself but also the harbor and its islands, the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda), the North Bay, the Monterey Peninsula, and even a bit of San Jose. As typical with these books, one of the highlights is the detailed tours (in this case, both walking and driving). .

San Francisco: Micro Pro Litera Press. Near Fine. (c.1986). First Edition. Softcover. [minor edgewear to covers, one tiny nick in spine]. Trade PB (B&W photographs) INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper. A breezy history of the theatre in San Francisco, with many illustrations -- in part, at least, an insider's view, since the author had himself been part of the Bay Area theatre scene as an actor, director, writer and critic for over thirty years. Signed by Author .

London: Chatto & Windus. Very Good+ in Good dj. 1957. First Edition. Hardcover. [minor shelfwear to bottom edge, light age-toning to edges of text block, spine very slightly turned, lower rear corner bumped; jacket edgeworn, very slightly darkened at spine, with various tiny nicks and small tears, a bit of paper loss at several corners, missing about 1/4-inch at top of spine (barely affecting "The" in title)]. Murdoch's third novel, about an affair between a married, middle-aged schoolmaster and a young artist. .

Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Company. Very Good in Good dj. (c.1938). First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . [light shelfwear, very slight deterioration to binding at top of spine; jacket is heavily edgeworn, soiled, shallow chipping along top edge, large chip at bottom of rear panel (no loss of text)]. The second book that the author managed to squeeze out of his experience on an East River tunnel gang. (The first, "East River," was published in 1935.) This book is often cited erroneously, by the chronologically-challenged, as the source for the 1935 Raoul Walsh film UNDER PRESSURE, which was actually based on "East River," which at one time (prior to its publication) was actually called "Sand Hog." Confused? Maybe you need both books, to help you sort it out. (Yes, I have a copy of "East River," too.) .

Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. for The Crime Club. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1974. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . [nice tight clean copy, faint wear to top and bottom edges of book; jacket slightly faded at spine, tiny tears at top corners of spine, one-inch closed tear at bottom of rear panel, light soiling to rear panel]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author (using her real name) on the half-title page: "To Robert Lewine -- / from an unknown admirer named / Helen Van Slyke / Sept, 1974." Romantic suspense/mystery novel about a woman who marries a doctor and moves to his luxurious family compound, called Madrugada, in Southern California -- but soon finds herself in danger, and convinced that "whatever the reason, someone is determined to drive her away from Madrugada." All of which is made immeasurably more unpleasant -- as life generally is (I can testify) -- "under the sudden onslaught of the Santa Ana Wind, whose fiery breath leaves none… Read More