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

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943. First edition of Vera Caspary's romantic psychothriller, an international bestseller that inspired the blockbuster 1944 film starring Gene Tierney. Caspary's legacy of strong, independent female characters was most realized in the fiercely self-possessed Laura, an advertising executive who is alternately considered a murderer and victim: "I picked up a cigarette. He hurried to light it. / 'Don't do that,' I said. / 'Why not?' / 'You can't call me a murderer and light my cigarette.'" Caspary was herself a formidable woman, who started her prolific writing career early. Her dust jacket biography is as entertaining as the novel itself: "Vera Caspary has been around. . . . A genius in selling things by mail, she has distributed in this way cold cream, milking machines, dancing, singing, one-pipe furnaces, rat virus, Zane Grey, Sax Rohmer, heredity, and sex." Recognized as a major contribution to the suspense genre, Laura was listed as a Haycraft-Queen cornerstone… Read More

[San Francisco]: Imagerie Pellerin Épinal (An Intrinsics Production), 1964. Oversized psychedelic reproduction of a nineteenth-century Épinal construction print, the third in a series of six European architectural models produced in San Francisco in the 1960s. In 1796, Jean-Charles Pellerin founded a workshop in the French town of Épinal, turning out inexpensive, hand-colored woodcuts of Catholic saints, Napoleonic battles, and storybook characters. By the end of the nineteenth century, lithography had emerged as the preferred process for Épinal prints, and the range of subjects had greatly expanded. One popular genre was the construction print, providing generations of French children with do-it-yourself toy models of architectural landmarks. This eye-popping modern series of lithographs reproduces six historic Épinal construction prints on a poster-sized scale, the images reimagined in the fluorescent Day-Glo colorways of the mid-1960s. The complete series includes: 1) the New Town Hall in… Read More

Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé S.A., Éditeurs, 1916. Signed limited edition of a scarce title on ancient Egyptian textiles, numbered 77 of 125 copies, signed by the authors on the colophon, and published as part of the series Mémoires d'Archéologie et d'Ethnographie Comparées. (An additional twenty-five lettered copies were printed, not intended for sale.) The book's line drawings and tipped-in color plates, along with a sample sheet reproducing five woven silk bands of the period, display the breadth and skill of early Egyptian through Coptic weavers, highlighting their characteristic use of materials, colors, and patterns. The authors argue that the ancient Egyptians used tablets ("cartons," or cards) as their primary weaving device, a technology used in 1200-1500 BCE Europe and Scandinavia. This theory has been disproven: the Egyptians did, in fact, use looms. Text in French. BnF 1199; 5515. A very nearly fine copy of a key visual sourcebook of Egyptian textile design in its highly… Read More

(London): Macmillan, 1967. First edition of this early children's title by Newbery winner Paula Fox, the story of an anxious (and anxiously watched) young boy: "Everyone wanted to help Lewis. That's why he was thinking of running away." Lewis's life improves markedly when his parents leave town, and a free-spirited sitter allows him to roam after school. Publishers today would likely shy away from a story that encourages children to explore caves with men they befriend in the park, but in Fox's telling, Lewis's adventures have a dreamlike, almost magical quality. Edward Ardizzone's drawings perfectly capture the boy's experience of oppression and liberation. A near-fine copy. Single volume, measuring 8.5 x 5.5 inches: [6], 57, [1]. Original black cloth lettered in silver, original clipped orange pictorial dust jacket printed in black and white. Black and white illustrations throughout text. Lightest edgewear and sunning, small tape repair to jacket verso, ghost of bookseller label to front flap.

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

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. First American edition, published three months after the British, of the fifth title in the Philip Marlowe detective series, signed by Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister follows the private eye to Hollywood, where Marlowe investigates a scandal involving a starlet, her gangster beau, and her missing brother. Chandler's disdain for the film business, informed by his own experiences as a screenwriter, is evident: "Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else." The Little Sister inspired the 1969 semi-noir film Marlowe, starring James Garner, who would go on to portray the equally sardonic detective Jim Rockford in the 1970s NBC television series The Rockford Files. Bruccoli A8.2.a. A scarce signed copy, in the original dust jacket designed by… Read More

Lans-en-Vercors, France: Locus Solus, 1961. Winter 1962 double issue of Locus Solus, dedicated to new poetry, signed by issue editor John Ashbery and five other contributors: Kenward Elmslie, LeRoi Jones (as Amiri Baraka), Kenneth Koch, Daniel Krakauer, and Larry Rivers. Other contributors include Diane Di Prima, Barbara Guest, Gerard Malanga, James Merrill, and Frank O'Hara. Published in France, but really produced below 14th Street in Manhattan, Locus Solus had an outsized impact on American poetry during its two-year run: "Each squat and plain issue looked like the serious literature of the French, a toned-down Gallimard volume perhaps" (Clay and Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side). A very good example, signed by six New York poets. Small octavo, measuring 7.25 x 4.75 inches: 294, [2]. Original blue printed wrappers. Signed by John Ashbery, Kenward Elmslie, LeRoi Jones (as Amiri Baraka, dated 1978), Kenneth Koch, Daniel Krakauer (inscribed "To Richard"), and Larry Rivers at their… Read More

England, 1900. Original watercolor by British artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945), first exhibited in her career-making 1901 solo exhibition: "Rarely, if ever has a woman painter made a great reputation as quickly and as thoroughly as Miss Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, whose series of watercolour drawings has, during last month, drawn the whole of artistic London to the Dowdeswell Galleries" (The Artist, June 1901). The young Fortescue-Brickdale was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite movement of Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais. She studied with John Ruskin as a teenager, and befriended John Byam Shaw, a protégé of Millais, at the Royal Academy, later teaching at Shaw's school of art. An outlier in a male-dominated field, she built a successful career as a fine art painter and book illustrator, becoming the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils, and working in sculpture and stained glass as well. Throughout her life, she was drawn to… Read More