Search Results: Titles starting with P from PY Rare Books

"The most popular and finest of all [Loti's] writings" (Gosse): an excellent example of the "edition de luxe" of the first edition, limited to 235 copies in large octavo format, this copy being #27.With an unusual high quantity of different states of the plates, and retaining its bright orange publisher's wrappers in fresh condition.A classic of French literature, Pêcheur d'Islande narrates about the romantic but inevitably sad life of Breton fishermen who sail each summer season to the foggy, ice-laden waters of Iceland. The French naval officer Pierre Loti (1850–1923) pays a personal tribute in this novel to the memory of his brother Gustave, a marine surgeon who fell ill in Cochinchina and died at sea. To this prose, Loti adapted some of the impressionist techniques of contemporary painters, especially Monet, combining them with elements of naturalism and exoticism.Loti wrote the novel from 1884 onwards in his estate of Rochefort, continued in the Far East and completed in Rochefort in March… Read More

Great two-volume émigré collection of poetry and analysis, in an attractive example in the original wrappers.
The first volume is a roll call of major émigré names, from Remizov, through Kuprin, to Teffi; it also contains one of the earliest, if not the earliest appearance of Nabokov's work in the West, published just a few months after he went into exile. His poem Panikhida [Requiem], written whilst Nabokov was at Cambridge, is a lament for his lost homeland. Interestingly, in all modern editions the poem is recorded as being written in 1920, but here is dated to the previous year.The second volume contains work by such masters as Balmont, Bunin, Chukovskii, and Voloshin - with an essay by Roerich to the memory of Leonid Andreev. It also contains what appears to be the first publication of Blok's Dvenadsat' outside of Russia.
Publihsed in New York, these two volumes were among the very first post-revolutionary collections of contemporary Russian poetry published anywhere, and together can be… Read More

Detailed illustrated history of this celebrated fortified monastery founded in the 1430s on an island of the White Sea - before becoming the first corrective labour camp of the Communist regime after the Revolution, and an early member of the GULAG system. With many full-page photographic plates and two large folding maps: of the Solovky islands and of the surrounding region.Provenance: Ya. D. Yagunov, 1936 (dated stamp to title); Avenir Nizoff (émigré, musician, and book collector who lived in Edmonton, Canada).Description: Quarto (30 x 23 cm). VIII incl. title and t.o.c., 225, [2] pp., with 27 plates of photographic reproductions, some double-page, and 2 folding plans loosely inserted; minimal occasional foxing, but overall very fresh internally. Publisher's maroon cloth with gilt lettering to upper cover, flat spine lettered in gilt; a bit rubbed, more on the edges and corners, bumped, spine lettering oxidized.