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

New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1969. First edition of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan's Achilles' Song, in which the Greek hero imagines his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, calling him away from Troy: "Thetis, then, / my mother, has promised me / the mirage of a boat, a vehicle / of water within the water, / and my soul would return from / the trials of its human state, / from the long siege." This is one of 26 copies lettered A to Z, each with an original illustration by the author, out of a total of 126 signed copies. Achilles' Song was issued as Number 7 in the Phoenix Bookshop Oblong Octavo Series, a twenty-volume series that included poems by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, and Louis Zukofsky. A fine copy, with an original drawing by Robert Duncan. Oblong volume, measuring 5 x 7 inches: [16]. Side-stitched olive green wrappers in integral pictorial dust jacket printed in green and black. Original color frontispiece drawing by Duncan executed in pen and crayon.… Read More

United States, late nineteenth century. Six hand-painted signs used by an American dance orchestra to alert the audience to the proper steps. John Spitzer observes that in nineteenth-century New York, "hundreds of orchestras played on a daily basis in theaters, restaurants and beer gardens, concert halls, circuses, and amusement parks. The ubiquity of the orchestra in nineteenth-century American cities forms a striking contrast to the rather narrow range of venues to which twenty-first-century orchestras are confined." Each sign features the name of a different dance on each side: Polka, Schottische, March, Quadrille, Waltz, Mazurka, Varieties, Gavotte, Lancers, York, Triange, and Selection. These social dances reflect the midcentury influx of immigrants, especially Germans, who shaped the popular American musical scene. While the orchestra that commissioned these signs is unknown, the carrying case bears the initials "AEO." See also: American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Spitzer,… Read More

London: Oxford University Press, 1959. First edition, publisher's presentation copy, of this midcentury collection of American men (and only men) of letters, signed by contributor Robert Penn Warren. Editor Harold Beaver construes "American" broadly, "not interpreting the word by place of birth or parentage only, but also by passport and length of residence," a decision that allows him to include W.H. Auden's essay on Henry James. Warren's contribution surveys the whole of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction: "he writes of two Souths: he reports one South and he creates another." Other essayists include R.P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Van Wyck Brooks, Richard Chase, Malcolm Cowley, Horace Gregory, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Harry Levin, F.O. Matthiessen, H.L. Mencken, Ezra Pound, Philip Rahv, I.A. Richards, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Austin Warren, Edmund Wilson, Yvor Winters, and Morten Dauwen Zabel. A fine copy of a literary time capsule, published at the height of the New Criticism. Pocket… Read More

Bramsche: Gebr. Rasch & Co, 1950. Scarce sample of wallpaper signed in the print by "Letizia Cerio" (more often spelled "Laetitia"), Capri-based artist renowned for her spare, whimsical line drawings. Founded in the late nineteenth century, German wallpaper firm Rasch won an international reputation through its collaborations with modernist designers from the Bauhaus and Vienna Secession. In the 1950s and 1960s, owner Emil Rasch commissioned wallpaper designs from artists across Europe, including Salvador Dalí and Bruno Munari, for the International Artists Collection. Cerio's "Amsterdam" paper dates from this period. A fine example of midcentury popular design. Color pictorial wallpaper sample, measuring 15.5 x 18.5 inches, printed in gold and ivory. Stamped on verso: "RASCH WATERFAST / Amsterdam WT 10 / R 2076 / $3.95 PER SINGLE ROLL.".

London: George Routledge & Sons, 1886. First edition, the Grolier 100 copy, inscribed by Kate Greenaway with three original sketches of young girls. First published in the eighteenth century, the ABC rhyme "The Tragical Death of A Apple Pye" appeared in countless chapbooks before Greenaway produced this colorful large-format edition. Her vibrant illustrations depict a crowd of children in Regency dress tussling over the oversized pie of the title. Finally, in Greenaway's original closing rhyme, "U V W X Y Z / All had a large slice / and went off to bed." A Apple Pie was a resounding popular success, although the book caused some tension between Greenaway and her friend John Ruskin, who disliked the stylized feet, "literal paddles and flappers," of Greenaway's children. Greenaway has inscribed this copy to Joan Ponsonby, born in 1887, the granddaughter of her close friends Gerald and Maria Ponsonby. The ink sketches of young girls that frame the gift inscription may be portraits of little Joan… Read More

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936. First edition of this illustrated biography of John James Audubon, written by pioneering American anthropologist and folklorist Constance Rourke: "This biography had its more distant origin in a concern with American frontiers . . . but characters have a way of transcending the liveliest general questions." In her interest in Audubon as an immigrant and an artist, Rourke emphasized the resourcefulness and creativity that epitomized, for her, the American sensibility. Audubon was a Newbery Honor book for 1937, though Rourke maintained that the biography was not written solely for children. A very good example, in notoriously fragile dust jacket. Single volume, measuring 8.75 x 6.25 inches: [10], 342. Original blue cloth boards lettered in silver, original clipped typographic dust jacket. Twelve full-color plates after Audubon prints, black-and-white illustrations throughout text, biographer's note and index at rear. Bookplate to front pastedown. Dust jacket… Read More

Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1872. Popular edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ambitious exploration of female artistry, first published in London in 1856, in a hand-painted vellum binding. The story of the aspiring writer Aurora Leigh established Browning's own place in the literary canon: "The world of books is still the world." The iconography of this striking binding, with its foliate designs and rampant lion, reflects Aurora's Florentine origins. The binder's ticket is that of Giulio Giannini, who specialized in attractive souvenirs of Italy for arts-minded English tourists. His firm, still active today, did a brisk trade in "Florentine Style" bindings on English-language classics set in Italy: Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, Eliot's Romola, Howells's Tuscan Cities, and, of course, Aurora Leigh. A fine copy of Browning's landmark verse novel, in a unique hand-painted binding by Giannini. Single volume, measuring 6.25 x 4.5 inches: [9], 10-334, [4]. Contemporary vellum hand-painted in gilt,… Read More