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

New York: George H. Doran Company, 1923. First edition of poet Elinor Wylie's fantastic Orientalist romance, her first novel, inscribed to Sinclair Lewis. The narrative follows an indolent English bride's travels across the East through a comic pastiche of eighteenth-century fictional clichés: "a Supreme Councillor returning to Bengal once had the audacity to send a glass of champagne and a magnificent pineapple to her cabin, with his respectful queries as to her welfare; only this personage's obvious senility prevented Gerald from giving him a glance over the card-table which would have curdled his blood forever against the most torrid suns of India." This copy of Jennifer Lorn was presented in the month of publication to Wylie's friend and mentor Sinclair Lewis, "who persuaded her that writing fiction was the way to earn money." The novel received bewildered but respectful reviews from contemporary critics. Lewis himself approved of her first effort: "At last, a civilized American novel." See E.H.… Read More

Paris: Simonin Cuny, 1900. Striking table game published on the occasion of the Universal Exposition of 1900, the world's fair held in Paris to celebrate progress in science, industry, and the arts. The game board features the fair's engineering marvel, the Grande Roue de Paris, the largest Ferris wheel ever constructed. Based on the classic "jeu de l'oie," or game of the goose, this game replaces the traditional sixty-three landing squares with spaces corresponding to the forty carriages of the Grande Roue. The spaces depict monuments, including the Louvre and Eiffel Tower; scientific achievements like the train and automobile; scenes of sports and amusements; and fates to avoid: death, prison, the dentist's chair! Five additional spaces are located outside the wheel, for a total of 45 landing squares. Printer Simonin Cuny specialized in children's games, puzzles, and toys, often drawing inspiration from current events. In 1904, the firm joined four other printers of amusements to form Les Jeux et… Read More

London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co, 1896. First edition of Thomas Hardy's controversial final novel, the eighth volume in his uniform series of Wessex Novels, accompanied by a letter to his friend Edward Clodd reporting his progress on the work. The story of a stonemason whose higher aspirations are brutally crushed, Jude the Obscure was the subject of immediate backlash: "his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small." Hardy's attack on class snobbery and compulsory marriage, and his sympathetic portrayal of a family created out of wedlock, so outraged readers that he abandoned the writing of novels altogether, turning to poetry in his final decades. Tipped into this copy is a four-page letter, dated September 2, 1894, sent by Hardy to his longtime friend, banker and man of letters Edward Clodd. Hardy regrets not seeing more of Clodd that summer, and confides that "the announcement in the D. Chronicle represents me as being considerably more advanced than I am with the tale [of Jude the… Read More