Search Results: Authors starting with J from Honey & Wax Booksellers

London: Macmillan, 1886. First edition of Henry James's most overtly political novel, one of 750 copies, first published in the Atlantic Monthly. The Princess Casamassima traces the friendship of a radical London bookbinder and an idle princess with revolutionary sympathies: "By way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn't be true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she had let him know that she liked him to speak in the manner of the people)." The comparatively action-packed plot, which turns on a terrorist assassination attempt, shows the influence of Charles Dickens and Émile Zola on James more clearly than his introspective fiction. Edel & Laurence A29. A near-fine copy of a major novel. Three octavo volumes, measuring 7.5 x 5 inches: iv, 252; iv, 257, [3]; iv, 242, [2]. Original dark blue-green cloth, double-rule border and panel stamped in black and blind, spines lettered in gilt with gilt publisher's device and decorative rules at top and bottom… Read More

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

San Francisco: Paul Elder & Company, 1910. A quartet of first editions of Mary Joss Jones's Hump Tree Booklets. The stories feature the adventures of the wildlife who live under the protective canopy of the Hump Tree, an old-growth arbor: "all the time through the hot, still air came the song of the Woodland People." The complete series comprised eight tales, bound separately in wrappers as the Hump Tree Booklets, and issued simultaneously in a single volume as The Hump Tree Stories. This bound group of four booklets, series-numbered 8, 3, 2, and 4, respectively, appears to have been issued in this format by the publisher, as evidenced by similar copies that have come to market. Remarkably fresh, near-fine examples of this uncommon children's series from San Francisco bookseller and publisher Paul Elder. Four volumes, measuring 8 x 6.5 inches: [6], 10, [4]; [6], 6, [4]; [6], 9, [1]; [6], 8, [2]. Publisher's color pictorial side-stapled wrappers, spines hole-punched and bound together with linen cord… Read More