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

London: Macmillan, 1881. First English edition of Henry James's moving New York story about a downcast heiress and an upstart suitor, successfully serialized on both sides of the Atlantic, and published in the United States in 1880: "Love demands certain things as a right; but Catherine had no sense of her rights; she had only a consciousness of immense and unexpected favors." Washington Square appears here with two 1879 stories by James: "The Pension Beaurepas," which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and "A Bundle of Letters," which appeared in The Parisian. An early newspaper photograph of what appears to be the James family home on Washington Place has been pasted into Volume I; the residential block where James was born was demolished in 1900 to make way for a ten-story commercial building, the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. This is the second impression of the first English edition of Washington Square, issued two months after the first impression, with pagination errors… Read More

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1923. First American edition of Bolshevik writer Libedinsky's first novel, first published in Russian in 1922, an account of one week in a remote Siberian village torn apart by the Revolution. Facing famine, Communist leaders order the villagers into the forest to chop wood for fuel, creating an opening for a counterrevolutionary revolt. The violent aftermath is reflected through the eyes of a dozen characters, both Reds and Whites, and the unlucky villagers caught in the middle: "The Easter bell-ringing floated over the town, and the sound of it was interwoven with the tapping of the machine-gun. . . . She got up with difficulty." A Week was the first proletarian novel to find a wide readership outside Russia. Translator Arthur Ransome attributes the novel's success to its documentary quality: "Libedinsky aimed so simply . . . his was so clearly an attempt to see rather than an attempt to describe." A Week would be withdrawn from Soviet libraries after Libedinsky's expulsion… Read More