Rare books from Riverrun Books & Manuscripts

Rome: Giovanni Bouchard, 1750. From the Collection of Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow. Broadsheets (537 x 370 mm). Letterpress title-page printed in red and black with the vignette by Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, portrait of Piranesi by F. Polanzani, frontispiece (Robison 1) and 16 plates of the Prima Parte di Architetture, Second Edition, First Issue (R. 2, 3, 5, 15-18, 6-12 [all numbered], 20, 19 [not numbered]); frontispiece of Vedute di Roma (Hind 2, First State), two double-page plates printed in two separate halves on two sheets; Pianta di ampio magnifico Collegio (R. 25), state II as usual, double-page; the four double-page plates of the Groteschi (R. 23, 24, 22, 21), Second Edition, First Issue; Parte di ampio magnifico Porto (R. 26), state III, double-page. All very fine impressions, watermark Fleur-de-Lys in Single Circle (R. 4, dated early 1750s), Contemporary Italian vellum, gilt-lettered on spine, edges stained red. Spine partly split; some occasional minor spotting, generally in very good… Read More

New York: The Library Fellows at the Whitney Museum of American Art [by Michael and Winifred Bixler Press and Letter Foundry], 1991. Spine faded as often with this book, a few scuffs to cloth, some minor soiling to slipcase. Oblong folio (32.9x42 cm; 13x16½ inches). Beautifully printed in letterpress. [16] pages With 9 mounted chromogenic photographic prints by Tina Barney: 27.7 x3 5.9 cm (11x14¼"). Original turquoise three quarter morocco over cloth; endpapers designed by Sage Reynolds; slipcase. One of an edition limited to 175 copies signed by Barney and Howe. An artist book collaboration between American playwright Tina Howe and American photographer Tina Barney produced as a benefit for the library of the Whitney Museum. An edition in the Artists and Writers Series. The text is a four-person dialogue written by Tina Howe, set on an Atlantic Coast beach in late August. The large-format images manipulate depth of field, and capture people on or around the beach, making the… Read More

New York: Wm. C. Locke & Co, 1851. Wrappers chipped at edges, professionally rebacked, some unobtrusive offsetting on map. 8vo. 50 pages. Large folding map on three joined sheets (21 x 1788 cm; 8.25 x 61.75 inches). 11 woodblock illustrations in text (and with 2 more not recorded in the index but always present). Original printed wrappers with woodblock vignette. SCARCE Hudson River Railroad travel guide published the first year in which the full line was completed. It covers points of interest along the route, with woodblocks illustrating the text. Topics include: the history of the Hudson River, the history of the construction of the Hudson River Railroad, and the cities, towns and villages along the Hudson, from New York City all the way to Troy.  Concerning the West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, the guide states: "the iron foundry [was] established here by Gouverneur Kemble. The works are situated about a mile west of the village, upon a small stream which tumbles rapidly down the mountains,… Read More

Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974. Title with a few soft creases and soil-marks, occasional light wear to corners, generally clean and fresh. Title and 29 photographs, prints, and mixed-media pieces, either full sheet or on mounts, each signed by the artist either on recto or verso. Each 14 x 11 inches (or smaller and mounted). Number 39 of 75 copies. The artists include Skip Atwater, L. Myers, S. Moore, Elsa C. Voelcker, Laddy Kite, F. Duffy, Paul Ginsberg, Gail De Loach, L. Blacklow, Joan Lyons, Jonathan Morse, Greg Taylor, David Greene, Eve Cohen, Steve Foote, Frank Pflaumer, J. Morse, Gunther Cartwright, Alan Winer, Erik Sundance, A, Rosen, Tad Goodale, and other artists. The Visual Studies Workshop was founded by Joan Lyons in 1971 and has been a crucible for experimentation ever since. The Workshop has published over 450 titles. Scarce: not in OCLC.

New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. A very good plus copy with some light spotting to sheet edges (not affecting open sheets), the dust jacket clipped and with two closed tears to upper front panel edge. 8vo. 255 pages. Color and duotone photographs. Original cloth; dust jacket. FIRST EDITION, first printing, inscribed by Morath and Miller (signed by both) on the title-page. Documenting their trip to China right after the death of Mao and the fall of Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, Morath and Miller's book provided rare insight into Chinese culture during this dramatic period of change.

Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1967. Ex-library copy, with inkstamps on title and at intervals in the margins of the text. Front joint split but holding, wear to binding, occasional pale foxing. Thick 4to (28.5 x 22 cm). Engraved frontispiece portait of Lincoln. xxx, 930 pages. Original dark-green half morocco, crimson cloth boards, spine gilt, marbled edges. FIRST EDITION, with inserterd engraved leaf dated 2 March 1867 at front printing the resolution by the Senate and House of Representatives to print this book and distribute one copy to each Senator and Representative of the Thirty-ninth Congress, and to each Foreign Government, and one copy to each Corporation, Association, or public body whose expressions of condolence or sympathy are published in the volume. One hundred copies were bound in full morocco, and the remaining copies were ound in half morocco, as on this copy.

A fine archive of three original drawings by the English "mouth artist" John Carter, two letters by his biographer, a copy of the revised edition of Carter's Memoir, and related materials. A fine collection of three original drawings by John Carter (31 July 1815 - 2 June 1850), an English mouth artist, together with a memoir and two autograph letters discussing Carter's work by William James Dampier, Carter's first biographer. The collection also includes a heliotype after a drawing by Carter as well as a list of subscribers to Dampier's memoir. The small collection was apparently presented by Dampier to one of his friends. Original drawings by carter are rare, as most "of his work, now widely dispersed and probably unrecognized, is of course only known from nineteenth century reproductions" (Trevor Disley) John Carter was born in Coggeshall, Essex, "of humble parents", as Dampier notes. At school "he showed a disposition to scribble the figure of a man, a horse, or a bird, upon his desk or copy… Read More

Göttingen: Steidl, 2016. A fine copy. Oblong folio (36 x 29 cm) 31 color photographs. Cloth; slipcase. Additional photograph in cloth chemise. DELUXE LIMITED EDITION, number 25 of 50 copies signed by Burtynsky with an original photograph, from an edition of 150 (three sets of 50 copies, each with one of three images) plus 15 artist's proofs. The additional image is that found of p. 4 of the book. "The images in this book are not about the battles being fought on the ground. Rather, they examine this ancient method of providing one of the most basic elements of our diet; as primitive industry and as abstract two-dimensional human marks upon the landscape." - Edward Burtynsky. For this series, the photographer traveled to Gujarat, India, to make images of the Little Ranch of Kutch, a region that is home to more than 100,000 salt workers extracting around one million tons of salt from the floodwaters of the Arabian Sea each year. "Salt has been their main industry for the last four hundred years.… Read More

Paris: Galerie Louis Carre, 1946. A clean, near-fine copy in wrappers with some very minute wear and pale offsetting. An attractive and finely printed catalog. 12mo (15.6 x 12 cm). 35, [17] pages. Frontispiece photograph of Calder in his studio in Roxbury, 7 plates, of which four in color (and two of these double-page), and one color heapiece of a mobile. Printed wrappers, the front wrapper with a photographic image of one of his mobiles in motion. First edition. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Galerie Louis Carre in Paris that ran October 25 through November 16, 1946. Text in French with contributions by Jean-Paul Sartre, and James Johnson Sweeney. 24 pieces were included in the exhibition, created between 1941 and 1946. The cover, frontispiece and three balck-an-white plates reproduce photographs by Herbert Matter.

Cleveland, 1966. Faint toning. 11 x 8.5 inches. Title leaf of translucent paper with an original drawing by levy. Mimeographed. 12 pages, on rectos only. Stapled wrappers, front cover with original ink scarab drawing by the author mounted. One of 33 copies. A scarce publication by one of levy's unnamed presses, being Edouard Naville's translation of 'The Litany of Ra.' The large original drawing of a scarab on the cover is reflective of levy's interest in the symbol, which he used as the title of his collection 'Scarab Poems.' Though neither his name, nor that of one of his presses, appears in the text, this has all the hallmarks of levy's important mimeographed books, and appears less frequently on the market than others. Taylor & Horvath P-90.

[Cleveland], 1964. Typescript, two pages, 4to (11 x 8.5 inches). With mailing folds. Two inked corrections. Published in 'The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle' and anthologized in 'The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,' ed. Alan Kaufman, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999. This typescript shows two corrections made in levy's hand - adding "in cleveland" at the end of the sub-title and changing the last words of the second stanza - that subsequently appeared in the published editions: See 'The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle,' edited by Mike Golden, NY: Seven stories Press, 1999, p. 199." Original manuscript and typescript material by the famed, and infamous, Cleveland poet is scarce, with only two pieces appearing at auction in the past 50 years.

London: Richard Griffin and Company, 1861. A lovely near-fine copy, the binding firm and bright. The contents with a previous owner's bookplate to the front pastedown and a little spotting to the endpapers, are otherwise clean and fresh throughout. A superb example of a very scarce title. 8vo (21.8 x 15.7 cm). Publisher's original green cloth with gilt titles and decoration to the upper board and spine, gilt to all page edges. Illustrated with 20 mounted albumen prints. FIRST EDITION of one of the earliest works of poetry to be illustrated by photography. The anthology combines extracts from authors including Keats, Clare, Wordsworth, Cowper, and Longfellow, with mounted photographs depicting idyllic scenes of contemporary rural life by the renowned stereographer William Morris Grundy (1806-1859), to create a harmonious interweaving of verse and imagery. Grundy was born in Birmingham, moving to Sutton Coldfield in 1850. Initially taking up photography as a hobby in 1855, he went on to achieve… Read More

Fold creases, but in fine condition. One page, 4to, on Masefield's Boars Hill letterhead, Oxford, docketed 2 May 1929, to E. J. Toms, secretary to Geoffrey Parsons, Editor of The Herald Tribune. With envelope address in Masefield's hand. Masefield thanks Toms for his letter of April 9th and for a clipping he sent. "Will you be so kind as to convey to the Editor my thanks for his courtesy in printing my appeal? With greetings, I am, Yours sincerely, John Masefield.

London: [Oxford University Press for] Humphrey Milford, 1918. Spine label rubbed and chipped at edges, spine toned, a few stains on covers, pale stain along extreme upper margins of text leaves, otherwise generally clean and fresh internally. 8vo. [8], 124 pages. 2 portraits engravings under tissue by Emery Walker, 2 double-page facsimiles of autograph poems, and 2 in-text facsimiles of the author's signature. Original holland-backed boards, printed paper spine label, untrimmed. First edition, limited to 750 copies, of Hopkins' first published collection of work. Unread except by a small coterie of friends during his lifetime, "Hopkins's poetry with its religious faith, his experiments in versification, his ‘dark night of the soul' would have reduced all his Victorian contemporaries to immediate insignificance - like Rimbaud's in France - had they but known of him" (Connolly, The Modern Movement 33).

Cincinnati: Strobridge & Co, 1876. Backstrip and corners worn, generally in fine condition. 68.5 x 664.5 cm (approximately 2.25 x 22 feet). Colored panorama joined and mounted on linen, lacquered, folding into original folio covers. Half calf. "A riot of color and detail." Second "Centennial" edition. A mammoth pictorial timeline of the history of the world, composed in a horizontal stream-of-time fashion and using Archbishop Ussher's canonical date of 4004 BCE for the Creation, it seamlessly moves from sacred to secular history. It was "a strong affirmation of the power of the regular, measured, single-axis timeline and the importance of visual tools in education" (Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, 'Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline,' Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, p. 173). It could be purchased as an accordion form book as here, or on rollers for mounting on the wall. The chart begins with a view of the world from the Eastern Hemisphere (since the discovery of the… Read More