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

(Johannesburg): Gryphon Poets, 1972. First edition of the first book by South African Beat poet Sinclair Beiles to be published in his home country, featuring vibrant original woodcuts by Cecil Skotnes. Beiles played a key role in a number of important Beat publications. In the 1950s, he befriended Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in Tangier, taking walks with Gysin to assuage the artist's paranoia, and helping Burroughs edit Naked Lunch, which Beiles would later publish as senior editor at the Olympia Press. While staying at the notorious Beat Hotel in Paris, Beiles, Gysin, Burroughs, and Gregory Corso created Minutes To Go (1960), the first book to use the "cut-up" poetic technique which Gysin and Burroughs would make famous. After many years abroad, Beiles returned to Johannesburg in the early 1970s. The exuberant poems collected in Tales reflect his skewed, apocalyptic take on both sex and technology, as in "The Cuckholding Computer:" "Nothing could be more astuter / than that damned computer… Read More

Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1936. First edition of Graham Greene's thriller about a double-crossed assassin seeking revenge, published one month before the English edition titled "A Gun for Sale." The inspiration for the 1942 film noir classic starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, Greene's seventh novel follows the conflicting interests of a hired gun, the private eye on his trail, and the detective's fiancée, who gets drawn into the chase. The dust jacket's promise, "A Novel of Terror and Devotion," reflects the flashes of humanity that illuminate Greene's hardened characters: "They were a little quietened because each had known a man who was suddenly dead; but the knowledge they shared gave them a sense of companionship which was oddly sweet and reassuring. It was like feeling safe, like feeling in love without the passion, the uncertainty, the pain." Barzun & Taylor 1574. A sharp, near-fine copy of a crime fiction classic. Single volume, measuring 7.25 x 5 inches: [8], 293, [3].… Read More

London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004. First edition of this collection of critical essays by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing, most dealing with the unpredictable aftershocks of reading: "I do not believe that one can be changed by a book (or by a person) unless there is already something present, latent or in embryo, ready to be changed." Lessing's subjects range from classic authors (Richardson, Stendhal, Austen, Tolstoy) to contemporaries (Anna Kavan, Nirad Chaudhuri, Christabel Bielenberg, Niccolò Tucci). A fine copy, signed by Lessing in the year of publication. Single volume, measuring 9 x 6 inches: viii, 376. Original pale grey paper boards lettered in gilt, pale blue endpapers, original unclipped photographic dust jacket. Signed and dated on the title page: "Doris Lessing / 19th October 04.".

New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. First edition of Rex Stout's fifth Nero Wolfe mystery, in the uncommon dust jacket, with a scarce contemporary inscription. Too Many Cooks finds the orchid-loving, gourmand detective at a meeting of Les Quinze Maîtres, the fifteen greatest world's chefs, as their guest of honor. Wolfe is reluctantly pulled into service when one of the chefs is murdered during a taste-test challenge, and is ultimately satisfied not so much by solving the case as by having obtained a coveted secret recipe for Saucisse Minuit. Too Many Cooks was serialized in The American Magazine before publication, and promoted with a national tour that sent Stout and a cast of actors across the country in a dedicated Pullman car. Each stop featured reenactments of the novel's scenes and special press luncheons that served dishes from the recipes included in the novel's appendix: "dishes as hearty and robust as the crimes which he undertakes to solve," including Terrapin Stewed in Butter, Avocado… Read More

(Hammersmith): (The Doves Press), 1912. Doves Press edition of William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra ("Antony" given as "Anthony," following the First Folio), the third of the Doves Shakespeare productions, one of 200 copies on paper out of a total print run of 215. Inspired by Thomas North's great Renaissance translation of Plutarch, and first performed in 1607, the play features one of Shakespeare's most complex heroines: "Age cannot wither her, nor custome stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feede, but she makes hungry, / Where most she satisfies." Founded by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, the Doves Press departed from the decorative medievalism favored by earlier English private presses: "The publication of the first Doves book, a few days after the death of Queen Victoria, marked the end of that age, and set the standard for printing in the twentieth century." One year after the appearance of Anthony and Cleopatra, as his partnership with Walker was… Read More

Barnard, Vermont: Vermont Toy Works, 1980. Two sets of brightly painted counting blocks, proportionally sized, each labeled with its corresponding numeral and that number spelled out. When housed in their trays, each column of blocks must add up to ten. Out of their trays, the blocks can be used to solve simple addition and subtraction problems, or for free play. Vermont Toy Works was a short-lived woodcraft toy company active in the 1980s: it is possible that one of the sets here was a prototype for the manufacture of the other. A very appealing survival, from both an educational and a design standpoint. Note: these blocks are heavy! Shipping at cost. Two sets of painted wooden blocks, each containing twenty-eight proportionally sized blocks numbered 1-10, housed in two wooden trays: the larger tray measuring 14.75 x 13.25 inches, the smaller 11 x 9.75 inches. "Vermont Toy Works" stamp on bottom of both trays. Light general wear.