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

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Jean Segaloff, 2016. Limited edition livre d'artiste celebrating modernist women writers and publishers in Paris, signed by artist Jean Segaloff. The book contains hand-colored etchings of twelve important literary women, most of them queer: Nancy Cunard, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Janet Flanner, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Bryer [sic] (Annie Winifred Ellerman, pen name Bryher), Gertrude Stein, Colette, and Kay Boyle. Each portrait is paired with a vellum overlay printed with a quotation by or about the subject. The sheet that reads "I opened a little book shop on the rue de Odeon called Shakespeare and Company" lifts to reveal bookseller Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, while the overlay to writer Djuna Barnes quotes a line from her most famous novel, Nightwood: "I talk too much because I have been made miserable by what you are keeping hushed." Segaloff notes: "The literary women of the Left Bank of Paris from… Read More

London: Printed for Lackington, Allen, and Co. Finsbury Square; and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster Row; Reprinted for Robert Triphook, St. James's Street, by Harding and Wright, St. John's Square, 1815. Deluxe large-paper reissues of two classic sixteenth-century source texts, the inspiration for some of the most important Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Featuring chapters by a number of English poets, Mirror for Magistrates was at first suppressed by the Lord Chancellor in 1555, then published under Elizabeth in 1559, and expanded by new contributors over the decades to come. The anthology offers pointed verse portraits of historic rulers, good and bad, with an eye to instructing those in power; Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, recommends "Mirrour of Magistrates meetly furnished of beautiful parts." The chapter on "Queene Cordila" served as a key source for Shakespeare's King Lear: "I must assay your friendly faithes to prove: / My daughters, tell mee how you doe mee… 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

Princeton: Creative Playthings, 1972. American edition of this iconic educational toy, graphic designer Fredun Shapur's four-way blocks. Shapur developed the first version of these blocks, featuring four simplified, stylized animals, in 1964. They were awarded the London Design Centre label, and picked up by Naef, the Swiss toy company, for manufacture and distribution in Europe. In 1968, Shapur became art director of the American toy company Creative Playthings, where his vision informed every aspect of the company's image: "Attractive design, high standards of craftsmanship, and well-informed, age-appropriate goods were the qualities that made Creative Playthings an emblem of the 'good toy' as it was understood in the postwar years" (Fredun Shapur: Playing with Design, 61). He developed two new variations on the four-way blocks for Creative Playthings, one featuring wild animals, one farm animals. In the American blocks, the animals are depicted more realistically than in the earlier European… Read More

Zeiningen, Switzerland: Kurt Naef, 1965. Swiss edition of this iconic educational toy, graphic designer Fredun Shapur's four-way blocks. Shapur developed the first version of these blocks, featuring four simplified, stylized animals, in 1964. They were awarded the London Design Centre label, and picked up by Naef, the Swiss toy company, for manufacture and distribution in Europe. In 1972, as art director of the American toy company Creative Playthings, Shapur would develop two more variations on his four-way blocks, slightly smaller in scale. These Naef animal blocks, arranged and rearranged, reveal in turn a blue horse, a black elephant, an orange cat, and a green snake. See Amy Ogata and Mira Shapur, Fredun Shapur: Playing with Design (2013). A high spot of modern graphic design. Six wooden puzzle pieces, screenprinted in four colors, each piece measuring 8.25 x 1.25 x 1.25 inches. "Spiel Naef / Swiss Made" printed at top lefthand corner of cat image. Light shelfwear.

London: John Wilkie, 1775. First edition, the Rosenbach copy, of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's great stage comedy The Rivals, first performed at Covent Garden in January 1775. The plot turns on the young heiress Lydia Languish, whose addiction to romance novels leads her to expect high drama from her suitors: "I thought we were coming to the prettiest distress imaginable . . . There had I projected one of the most sentimental elopements! - so becoming a disguise! - so amiable a ladder of Ropes!" Lydia's easily confused guardian Mrs. Malaprop, who continually mistakes one word for another, would inspire a new literary term in English, "malapropism." ESTC T45136. First issue, with the catchword EPI- on the final page signaling that the Epilogue is to follow; the Epilogue actually appears here after the Prologue, with the Errata and Dramatis Personae. Page 79 correctly numbered. This copy belonged to the great American book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach (1876-1952), who helped build the collections of Henry… Read More

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1895. Limited edition, one of 450 copies printed by the DeVinne Press, of Edmund Spenser's ode to his bride Elizabeth Boyle, first published in 1595: "Set all your things in seemely good aray / Fit for so joyfull day, / The joyfulst day that ever sunne did see." The poem's twenty-four stanzas correspond to the hours of the wedding day, as Spenser describes the morning's preparations, the ceremony, the feast, and the final "safety of our joy" after nightfall. The decorative Art Nouveau binding and illustrations, informed by English private press book design, are the work of American painter George Wharton Edwards: "From cover to cover the book carries out one artistic scheme with the text, presenting a unique conception which is original with the artist" (Dodd, Mead & Company.) This edition of 450 copies was issued alongside a signed limited edition of 25 copies on vellum. Provenance: Lee D. Witkin, the influential New York gallerist who created the modern market for… Read More

Milan: Sergio Tosi Stampatore, 1969. First trade edition of this early livre d'artiste by Italian artist Fausta Squatriti, offered at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with her 1969 exhibition at New York's Kozmopolitan Gallery. Squatriti's abstract candy-colored lithographs are teamed with an account of her work by critic Gillo Dorfles, printed in both English and Italian, titled "Fausta Squatriti's 'Disquieting Objects.'" Dorfles argues that Squatriti's vibrantly colored, futuristic sculptures represent the "equivocal nature half-way between the biological and the mechanical," "the furnishings terrestrial astronauts have discovered in the dwellings of a remote galaxy." He concludes that Squatriti's pop art represents "the revenge of her femininity . . . the distortion and mockery of the rigour of constructivism." Both the signed limited edition of fifty copies and this trade edition, printed in an unknown limitation, are scarce on the market. A very good example of an uncommon livre… Read More

London: George Routledge & Sons, 1914. First edition of this posthumous short story collection assembled by Bram Stoker's widow, who claims in the preface that "Dracula's Guest" is a "hitherto unpublished episode from 'Dracula' . . . originally excised owing to the length of the book." That origin story remained unchallenged for years: "Dracula's Guest" was even reprinted in an edition of Dracula, restored to its assumed place. The discovery of Stoker's original manuscript of Dracula in 1984 called into question the lost chapter theory, and there remains no consensus on whether he intended "Dracula's Guest" to be included in the novel. The story describes the narrator's encounter with a mysterious "wolf - and yet not a wolf!" on Walpurgis Night, "when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel." The first state of the dust jacket, while recorded, is… Read More

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

Enviro-Tote, 2022. While supplies last! First edition Honey & Wax totes. Heavyweight natural cotton tote bag, measuring 15 x 13 inches, printed with the Honey & Wax logo.