Search Results: Titles starting with W from The Manhattan Rare Book Company

Boston; Boston and New York: Ticknor & Fields; Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906. First edition. Original cloth. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF A SEMINAL WORK OF AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH MANUSCRIPT LEAF FROM THOREAU'S MEMOIRS. First published in a run of two-thousand copies in Thoreau's native Massachusetts, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854) synthesises the thematic core of the Transcendentalist movement: a simple life with immediate connection to the natural world. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Thoreau cloistered himself in a cabin built by himself within the acreage of Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland in Concord, Massachusetts. From this isolated sojourn emerged Thoreau's most prolific work, which encapsulates his ideas on self-reliance and humankind's relationship with nature. "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer," writes Thoreau, continuing, "Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far… Read More

London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1933. LIMITED FIRST EDITION. original dust jacket. Very Good/Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF YEATS'S COMPREHENSIVE AND ACCOMPLISHED COLLECTION THE WINDING STAIR AND OTHER POEMS , ONE OF ONLY 2000 COPIES PRINTED. "Yeats is now seen as one of a handful of Irish writers whose influence and example helped create twentieth-century modernist literature in the English language... His huge international reputation is securely based on the mystery and grandeur of his late verse and the poignancy of his love poetry, but he first came to fame as the exotically Celtic poet of a 'new' nationalist Ireland: almost single-handed, he made Irishness culturally fashionable. Spearheading a great cultural renaissance, he moved into his maturity as the voice of his country" (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). "Much as he seeks in this long volume, bringing together 64 poems written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, images of order and serenity, he is still drawn to the wild, the… Read More

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860. First. Fine. SCARCE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST STATE WITH THE FIRST ISSUE BINDING of one of the first and most influential detective novels. A beautiful copy. Note: We can find no other examples of the first issue with first state ads in public auction records. After the publication of The Woman in White William Wilkie Collins earned an international reputation as a master of his craft, a pioneer of detective writing and a creator of a new genre. Born in London in 1824, he was the son of a well-known landscape painter and a former governess. When he was twelve his family spent two years in Italy and France and Collins became fluent in French and Italian and learned more "among the scenery, the pictures, and the people, than I ever learned at school." His family returned to England when Collins was fourteen and as a boarding school student he told nightly stories to appease the dormitory bully. He later recalled that "it was this brute who first awakened in me,… Read More

New York: Xavier Moreau Inc. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine. SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION of one of Newton's most successful books, illustrated with 180 black-and-white photographs. Although the limitation is not stated, it is believed that the edition was limited to 200 copies. (New York): Xavier Moreau Inc., (1984). Tall quarto, original silver-stamped gray cloth, original slipcase. A fine copy.

Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company/Riverside Press. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Autograph edition, number 43 of 750 copies signed by Burroughs. Beautifully bound in publisher's morocco. Complete 23-volume set, profusely illustrated with engraved or photogravure frontispieces and other illustrations throughout on Japan paper. Note: A manuscript leaf is tipped in at the beginning of Volume I, but appears to be from Lady Rose's Daughter by Mrs. Humphrey Ward and not from John Burroughs' writings. Provenance: The George M. Pflaumer (Christie's 1997). Octavo, publisher's three-quarter morocco, gilt decorated spines with floral patterns, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt; text partially unopened. A few volumes with light rubbing to leather. An exquisite set.