lamdha books -
Catalogue of literary biographies

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203175 [Alan Bennett] Bennett, Alan Keeping On Keeping On Profile Books/Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 2016. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with decorative endpapers; 721pp., with 16pp. of full-colour plates. Mild wear; some light scuffing to the board edges. Dustwrapper lightly edgeworn (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. Click here to order $30

95191 [Allen Ginsberg] Ginsberg, Allen The Letters of Allen Ginsberg Da Capo Press, New York NY, 2008. First edition: octavo; hardcover, quarter bound in papered boards with gilt spine titling and black endpapers; 468pp. Minor wear; spotting to upper text block edges. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $25

88639 [Anais Nin] Bair, Deirdre Anais Nin A Biography Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London, 1995. First edition. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 654pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Very minor wear. Mild wear to the dustwrapper; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $28

39955 [Anton Chekhov] Chekhov, Anton (Gordon McVay, trans. & ed.) Chekhov - Folio Society edition A Life in Letters The Folio Society, London, 1994. First printing: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and decorations to the boards; 378pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece and 16pp. of plates likewise. Minor wear. Fine in a like slipcase. Click here to order $30

205811 [Anton Chekhov] Pritchett, V.S. Chekhov A Spirit Set Free Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., London, 1988. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 235pp. Mild wear; text block and page edges toned. Dustwrapper rubbed and sunned along the spine panel. Very good. Click here to order $22

81864 [Arthur Ransome] Chambers, Roland The Last Englishman The Double Life of Arthur Ransome David Godine, Boston MA, 2012. Octavo; hardcover; 389pp., with monochrome plates. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. "Arthur Ransome, the sailing enthusiast, amateur angler and author of Swallows and Amazons, was a shadowy figure keen to protect his privacy. Over the half-century of his writing career he contrived some elaborate autobiographical fictions; this makes him a difficult subject for a biographer. Roland Chambers, wisely, has chosen to construct a life of Ransome not found in his books, and relied instead on documentary sources. In 2005, 40 years after he died, MI5 released its files on Ransome. These revealed an Edwardian adventurer of confused political allegiances and moralities, who compared Lenin to Oliver Cromwell and denied the Soviet Red Terror. As a young man, Ransome may have acted as a double agent for Great Britain and Bolshevik Russia. With Machiavellian adroitness he infiltrated the Kremlin's top brass in Moscow and, alone among British citizens, attended the inauguration of the Comintern established by Lenin in March 1917 to foment revolution abroad. That was not all. In 1924, in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, Ransome married Leon Trotsky's private secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. Chillingly, he had congratulated Trotsky on his 'merciless' suppression of the White Guards and other 'bloodsucking' counter-revolutionaries. This same apologist for Bolshevism later wrote a series of children's adventures set in the Lake District which, with their pastoral, old-fashioned view of Britain, shaped the imagination of a generation. If there was a trace of Bolshevik intransigence in the rules and regulations devised by the Walker children for their Lakeland utopia, Ransome did not want it to show. His anxiety about how his youthful Russian escapades might be construed in later years never left him; 'The Last Englishman' is the story of his Soviet double life and Soviet sympathies... The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, was published posthumously in 1967; according to Chambers, the Russian chapters are a tissue of fabrication. Still, no other Englishman had seen the Bolshevik Revolution from such close quarters, or from such unusually confused allegiances, and this sombre biography absorbs from start to finish." - Ian Thomson. Click here to order $25

88283 [August Strindberg] Meidal, Bjorn & Bengt Wanselius (Sarah Death, trans.) The Worlds of August Strindberg Max Strom, Stockholm Sweden, 2012. Quarto; hardcover, illustrated cloth boards with gilt upper board and spine titling and black endpapers; 509pp., with many illustrations. Minor wear only. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Fine. Click here to order $70

89601 [Bruce Chatwin] Chatwin, Bruce (Elizabeth Chatwin & Nicholas Shakespeare, eds.) Under the Sun The Letters of Bruce Chatwin Viking/Penguin Books Inc., New York NY, 2011. First US edition: octavo; hardcover, quarter bound in papered boards with gilt spine titling; 554pp., with many monochrome plates. Minor wear; mildly toned text block edges. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $25

92292 [Charles Baudelaire] Starkie, Enid Baudelaire New Directions, New York NY, 1958. Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards; 623pp. Moderate wear; slightly shaken; spine extremities softened; text block edges toned with some spotting; offset to the endpapers. Dustwrapper is rubbed with some chipping at the spine panel extremities; a few small tears with associated creasing; mild rubbing; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $25

50777 [Charles Dickens] Ackroyd, Peter Dickens Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd., London, 1990. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling and decorative endpapers; 1,195pp., with 32pp. of monochrome plates. Moderate wear; slightly shaken; text block top edge dusted. Dustwrapper mild rubbed; sunned along the spine panel; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $30

70178 [Charles Dickens] Dickens, Charles (Introduction by Norman Page, ed.) Family History - Five Volumes Routledge/Thoemmes Press, London, 1999. Five hardcover volumes, octavo; hardcovers, with gilt spine titles; 1607pp. [278pp. + 249pp. + 222pp. + 466pp. + 392pp.], with many engraved illustrations. Mild dusting and staining of the text block edges. No dustwrappers, as issued. Near fine. "Dickens' novels present a variety of depictions of family life from the 'happy families' such as the Nubbles in "The Old Curiosity Shop" and the Toodles in "Dombey and Son" to the families impaired by the absence of one or more members of the nuclear group, like David Copperfield, who has never known his father and the motherless Paul Dombey. The 'happy families' are typically working-class, industrious, and equally notable for cheerfulness and cleanliness; they perhaps represent to some extent not only a democratic contrast with the failings and corruptions of middle-class families, but a sentimental wish fulfilment or idealization of the kind of family that Dickens would have liked to have grown up in. His own family life had much more closely resembled the ramshackle, insecure existence of the Micawbers in "David Copperfield"... In all these ways, and many others, Dickens never ceased to explore in his imaginative writings the dynamics and tensions of family life. The outline ... of his own experience of living in a family, first as son and brother, and later as husband and father, suggests that he was exceptionally well qualified to do so." (Norman Page). Click here to order $350

50791 [Charles Dickens] Dickens, Charles (Madeleine House, & Graham Storey, eds) The Letters of Charles Dickens - The Pilgrim Edition Volume Two, 1840-1841 Oxford University Press. London, 1969. First edition: octavo; hardcover; 547pp. Mild wear; text block top edge lightly foxed; very faint foxing to endpapers. Dustwrapper with 5mm closed tear at head of spine (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. This volume presents 706 letters. Click here to order $100

50790 [Charles Dickens] Dickens, Charles (Madeleine House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, eds.] The Letters of Charles Dickens - The Pilgrim Edition Volume Three, 1842-1843 Oxford University Press, London, 1974. First edition: octavo; hardcover; 692pp. Minor wear; text block top edge lightly foxed. Dustwrapper price clipped and very slightly rubbed and edgeworn (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. This volume presents 772 letters. Click here to order $100

84060 [Charles Dickens] Tomalin, Claire Charles Dickens A Life Penguin, New York, 2011. Octavo; hardcover; 527pp., illustrations and 24pp. of monochrome plates. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Click here to order $24

84743 [Colette] Gilmour, Jane Colette's France: Her Lives, Her Loves Hardie Grant Publishing, Melbourne Vic., 2013. Royal octavo; hardcover, with illustrated boards and endpapers; 205pp., with many colour and monochrome illustrations. No dustwrapper as issued. Near fine. 'Monstrous innocence was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingenue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle epoque, scandalous lesbian, risque music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious output, theatre reviewer, beautician, seducer, the most feline of cat-lovers and, ultimately, garlanded literary lioness. Yet her phoniness should not deter people from reading her books. Although most of her work resembled an imaginary autobiography, it was never self-obsessed or constricting. On the contrary, she used her fictionalised self as the centrepiece of a worldly comedy with a cool, sane vision which skewered the moralising humbug of the Third Republic and lampooned a patriarchy of pompous, empty, third-rate men. She is playful, teasing, supple; full of gaiety and zest; and an exquisite stylist, so rich and simple, exact and clear, perceptive and shrewd. Rereading her, one finds that her creed of sexual and emotional fulfilment has scarcely dated. Her dialogue remains as crisp and suggestive as ever. The air of audacity has not staled, even if the lovers' anguish seems contrived. And always she remains a glorious, lyrical observer of natural beauty. Colette was catapulted into marriage at the age of 20 to Henri Gauthier-Villars. This rascal had a stable of poor hacks - known as negres - who churned out journalism and novels which he published as his own work under the nom de plume of Willy. Colette was press-ganged into the negres, and under Willy's control, locked in her room, wrote six phenomenally successful autobiographical novels with such titles as Claudine a l'ecole and Claudine a Paris. She broke away from literary slavery, and from the subjugation of an odious marriage, in 1906. Thereafter she set herself against the duties, prohibitions and guilt imposed by men, and supported herself as a mime artist, dancer and music-hall performer. Her first lesbian affair - encouraged by her husband - had occurred in 1901 with 'Georgie' Raoul-Duval, as described in Claudine en menage. There is an affably personal touch to Jane Gilmour's book. During 'les evenements' of 1968, she worked in Paris on a doctoral thesis about Colette. Returning to her native Australia, her career took other directions; but in retirement she returned to Europe to refresh her research and write Colette's France. The book is gentle and affectionate, prettily illustrated, without the austerities of academic analysis, and will make amiable holiday reading for visitors to France." - Richard Davenport-Hines Click here to order $25

80658 [Colette] Kristeva, Julia (Jane Marie Todd, trans.) Colette Columbia University Press, New York NY, 2004. Octavo; hardcover; 521pp. Mild wear; remainder mark to the lower text block edge. Minor wear to dustwrapper edges; a crease to the front flap. Very good to near fine. In this final volume of her trilogy on female genius (Hannah Arendt; Malanie Klein), Parisian linguistics professor Kristeva employs her prodigious arsenal of feminist scholarship and psychoanalytic prowess to prove why the French author of Cheri and Gigi deserves such intellectual distinction. A writer, dancer and sexual gourmand, Colette was the sort of woman who took boxing lessons in order to acquire 'the most vicious punch possible.' Seducing both male and female lovers (including her own stepson), the thrice married and intensely prolific aesthete ignored the sexual mores of her time and sublimated her lifestyle in a lyrical prose that Kristeva equates with the light-filled palettes of Poussin and Watteau. Expertly translated by Todd, the dense biography is a fascinating read for lovers of belle-lettres, but it assumes that readers already possess a substantial familiarity with Colette's work. After breezing through the author's life, Kristeva launches into a close reading of all seven movements to 1905's Tendrils of the Vine (even breaking down the title by its vocal vibrations) and proceeds to scrutinize Colette's strained relationship with her mother, Sido. Kristeva is at her best when she uses psychoanalysis to explore the 'perverse acts' that punctuated Colette's life, noting that for Colette, 'writing itself appears as a substitute for erotic pleasure and the text as a fetish.' Clearly in awe of her subject, Kristeva candidly admits that she feels' all the humility of the immigrant when faced with her language, over which she asserts her irrevocable mastery,' and does her idol proud by completing a rousing, academically rigorous, detailing of her life." - Publishers Weekly Click here to order $25

98749 [C.S. Lewis] Lewis, C.S. (ed. W.H. Lewis) Letters of C.S. Lewis Geoffrey Bles, London, 1966. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling on a blue label; 308pp., top edges dyed blue, with monochrome plates. Mild wear. Scraping and wear to dustwrapper edges with tiny missing segment to the top edge of the lower panel; now backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $40

43386 [D.H. Lawrence] Lawrence, D.H. (Introduction by Aldous Huxley, ed.) The Letters of D.H. Lawrence William Heinemann, London, 1956. Third edition: octavo; hardcover; 889pp., with a monochrome frontispiece. Mild wear; boards slightly bumped on the corners and showing some stains and insect damage; text block edges and preliminaries are faintly foxed; retailer's stamp to the front pastedown. The price-clipped dustwrapper is sunned and mildly rubbed with slight shelfwear; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Good. Click here to order $40

45295 [Djuna Barnes] Herring, Phillip Djuna The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes Viking/Penguin Books Inc., New York NY, 1995. Octavo; hardcover; 386pp., with many illustrations. Minor wear; lightly spotted text block edges. Slightly rubbed dustwrapper with minor edge wear; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. "Djuna is the bitter brew of a great writer's proud, horrific life. It sent me back to her Nightwood in still greater awe of that wonderful modern classic. For me, Phillip Herring's book portrays Djuna Barnes as fated to write - and to suffer for writing - Nightwood, which in twentieth-century literature is as singular as Djuna Barnes herself." - John Hawkes Click here to order $22

8829 [Doris Lessing] Lessing, Doris Under My Skin Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 HarperCollins Publishers, London, 1994. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 421pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece and 12pp. of plates likewise. Minor wear; some very slight insect damage to the spine cloth. Dustwrapper lightly rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $24

44078 [Dylan Thomas] Fitzgibbon, Constantine (ed.) The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas J.M. Dent Ltd., London, 1966. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 432pp., top edges dyed maroon. Minor wear. Dustwrapper slightly rubbed with mild wear to edges; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Dylan Thomas's letters bring the poet and his times to life in a way that almost no biography can. The letters begin in the poet's schooldays, and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on his own work and on his friends, as well as unguarded and certainly unpolitical comments on the work of his contemporaries - T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender among others. ('Spender should be kicked... Day-Lewis hissed in public and have his balls beaten with a toffee hammer') These letters cast Thomas's adolescence in Swansea and his love affair with Caitlin into sharper focus. Thomas's letters tell a remarkable story, each letter taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him. Click here to order $25

34384 [Edith Sitwell] Greene, Richard (ed.) Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell Virago, London, 1997. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 484pp. Previous owner's name in pencil. Minor wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $25

57246 [Edward Lear] Lehmann, John Edward Lear and his world Thames and Hudson, London, 1977. Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 128pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; board edges lightly browned; mild offsetting to endpapers; toned and spotted text block edges; previous owner's name in ink. One or two tiny spots on dustwrapper; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $25

210780 [E.M. Forster] Moffat, Wendy E.M. Forster A New Life Bloomsbury Plc., London, 2010. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 408pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Minor wear; text block top edge lightly toned; a small mark to the text block fore-edge. Dustwrapper lightly sunned along the spine panel. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $30

64350 [Ernest Hemingway] Meyers, Jeffrey Hemingway A Biography Macmillan, London, 1986. First edition: octavo; hardcover with gilt spine titling; 644pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; board edges and corners lightly rubbed; toned text block edges. Mild rubbing and edgewear to dustwrapper. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $24

92837 [Ernest Hemingway] Spanier, Sandra & Robert Trogdon (eds.) The Letters of Ernest Hemingway - 1907-1922 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 2011. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt upper board and spine titling; 431pp., with many monochrome plates. Minor wear; "Shakespeare & Co." retailer's stamp to the front free endpaper with mild offsetting to pastedown. Dustwrapper. Near fine. Click here to order $40

48619 [Evelyn Waugh] Waugh, Evelyn (Michael Davie, ed.) The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, 1976. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 814pp. Moderate wear; shaken; spine extremities softened; mild spotting to the preliminaries. Dustwrapper rubbed and edgeworn; sunned along the spine panel; now backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $35

64099 [Fyodor Dostoyevsky] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (Kenneth Lantz, trans.) A Writer's Diary Volume II 1877-1881 Quartet Publishing Ltd., London, 1995. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 1,455pp. Moderate wear; pencil underlining to the early pages; a few scattered spots on the text block top edge and mild toning to text block and page edges. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $75

96425 [Gaius Valerius Catullus] Dunn, Daisy Catullus' Bedspread The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet William Collins/HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2016. Octavo; hardcover; 312pp., with maps and diagrams, 8pp. of colour plates and many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper. Near fine. "The subtitle of Daisy Dunn's first book - 'the life of Rome's most erotic poet' - may prove something of a letdown for the dirty mac brigade. Aficionados of lively, finely crafted biography, however, are well served. Dunn acknowledges that independent evidence of Catullus's life in the last century BC is all but nonexistent, leaving the poetry - assumed to be autobiographical - as the chief source of illumination. She skilfully avoids the pitfalls of obscurity or glibness, and the central thread of Catullus's great love for the married Clodia Metelli, the 'Lesbia' of his poems, is both haunting and fascinating. Weaving well-researched social history with a compelling account of political machinations in Rome, the picture here is not just of a libertine prone to writing of his obscene desires, but a soulful man at the heart of a remarkable age." - Alexander Larmand Click here to order $23

72685 [Georgette Heyer] Hodge, Jane Aiken The Private World of Georgette Heyer The Bodley Head, London, 1984. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 216pp., with many colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; mild spotting to the endpapers and preliminaries. Dustwrapper spine panel mildly sunned and flaps foxed; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $25

214078 [Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas] Souhami, Diana Gertrude and Alice Pandora Press, London, 1991. Octavo; hardcover, with silver gilt spine titling; 268pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; board corners slightly frayed; mildly toned and spotted text block top edge. Dustwrapper with scraping and chipping at corners, wear to edges; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film with white paper backing. Very good. Click here to order $30

207029 [Graham Greene] Greene, Graham A Life in Letters Little Brown & Co. Ltd., London, 2007. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with silver gilt spine titling; 446pp., with monochrome plates. Minor wear. Spine panel and upper edge of dustwrapper faded; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $25

207031 [Henry James] Horne, Philip (ed.) Henry James A Life in Letters Penguin Books (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Camberwell Vic., 1999. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 667pp. Minor wear; mild toning to text block edge. Slightly rubbed dustwrapper; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $35

91805 [Jack Kerouac] Charters, Ann Kerouac A Biography Straight Arrow Books, San Francisco, 1973. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with blue spine-titling; 419pp., with monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; mild foxing to boards with very slightly toned edges; toning and spotting to text block edges. Dustwrapper with sunned spine and moderate insect damage to fore-edges; small missing segment to front flap; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Good to very good. Click here to order $50

211388 [Jack Kerouac] Charters, Ann (ed.) Jack Kerouac - two volumes "Selected Letters, 1940-1956" & "Selected Letters, 1957-1969" Viking/Penguin Books (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Ringwood Vic., 1995 & 1999. First edition: two volumes, octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound - Volume 1 in cloth; Volume 2 in papered boards - with bronze spine titles; 1,143pp. [629pp. + 514pp.]. Mild wear; slightly shaken; spine extremities softened and board edges mildly rubbed and chipped; text block top edges dusted; some spotting and mild marks to the other text block edges. Dustwrappers lightly rubbed and edgeworn and Volume 2 is price-clipped; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $70

97963 [James Joyce] Cato, Bob & Greg Vitiello (Introduction by Anthony Burgess) Joyce Images W.W. Norton, New York NY, 1994. Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 112pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; slightly spotted upper text block edges. Dustwrapper edgeworn with very slight toning. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $30

203554 [James Thurber] Thurber, James (Harrison Kinney, ed. with Rosemary Thurber) The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber Simon & Schuster Inc., New York NY, 2003. Reprint: royal octavo; hardcover; quarter-bound in cloth with gilt spine titling; 798pp., untrimmed, with many monochrome plates. Minor wear only. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Click here to order $30

85339 [Jameses] Lewis, R.W.B. The Jameses A Family Narrative Andre Deutsch Ltd., London, 1991. Octavo; hardcover, quarter bound with gilt spine titling, upper board titles and decoration and endpaper maps; 695pp., with monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; mild spotting and marks to text block edges. Slightly rubbed dustwrapper with mild browning and wear to edges; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Click here to order $28

38445 [Janet Frame] King, Michael Wrestling with the Angel A Life of Janet Frame Picador/Pan Macmillan (Aust.) Pty. Ltd, Sydney NSW, 2000. Octavo; hardcover; 583pp., with 24pp. of monochrome plates. Minor wear; lightly toned text block edges. Dustwrapper. Very good to near fine. In this rigorously researched authorized biography, Michael King looks back over Frame's anguished life. At her request, the book - which draws from previously unavailable personal documents - lacks critical literary analysis (although King does note that her writing conveys the "sense that reality itself is a fiction, and one's grasp on it no more than preposterous pretense and pretension"). But the focus here is not on Frame's works; instead, King describes her life as wordsmith and survivor. In effect two books, the first half of Wrestling with the Angel is a dramatic account of Frame's struggle to survive a painful and emotionally troubled life (two of her sisters drowned, and she attempted suicide) and to write. King details Frame's early life - her travels into and out of psychiatric hospitals (where her anxiety neuroses were dangerously misdiagnosed as schizophrenia - she narrowly escaped a lobotomy) - as well as the writing career she began in her mid-30s. In the anticlimactic second half of the book, he describes Frame's succes d'estime: the literary prizes she won, the money troubles that followed and her compulsive moving from place to place (five times in one two-year period), in New Zealand and abroad, which testified to the persistence of her unexorcised anxieties. - Publisher's Weekly Click here to order $25

95736 [Jean Cocteau] Cocteau, Jean (Jesse Browner, trans.) Diary of an Unknown Paragon House, New York NY, 1988. First US edition: octavo; hardcover, with bronze spine titling; 233pp., untrimmed page edges. Minor wear; owner's name; mild scattered spotting on text block edges. Very good to near fine in like dustwrapper. Click here to order $30

73565 [Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud] Nicholl, Charles Somebody Else Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 Jonathan Cape/Random House (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Milsons Point NSW, 1997. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 335pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Minor wear; slightly cocked; mild softening to the spine extremities. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. At the age of twenty-five, Arthur Rimbaud - the infamous author of A Season in Hell, the pioneer of modernism, the lover and destroyer of Verlaine, the "hoodlum poet" celebrated a century later by Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison - turned his back on poetry, France, and fame, for a life of wandering in East Africa. In this compelling biography, Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of Rimbaud's life as a trader, explorer, and gunrunner in Africa. Following his fascinating journey, Nicholl shows how Rimbaud lived out that mysterious pronouncement of his teenage years: "Je est un autre" - I is somebody else. Click here to order $28

73564 [Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud] Robb, Graham Rimbaud Picador/Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London, 2000. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 552pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Mild wear; lightly toned text block edges. Slight scuffing and sunning to dustwrapper. Very good. "Still another biography of the poet who stopped writing before he was 20! Over a century after his death, the procession of biographers, translators, critics and hagiographers continues. It would seem that no definitive identification can be made (Rimbaud the symbolist, the surrealist, the Bolshevik, Rimbaud the bourgeois, the crook, the pervert, Rimbaud the prophet, the superman, the mystic, Rimbaud the Catholic, the cabalist, the atheist, etc.); the latest 'proved' avatar is forever recycled as evidence - faulty or secure - on which to base the next. Yet this endless judiciary process ensures an immortality which has little to do with the works of Arthur Rimbaud (who took the initiative to publish only one volume, 'Une Saison en Enfer' (A Season in Hell), a collection of nine prose poems; all his other writing appeared under others' auspices (he was long gone in Africa when the 'Illuminations' finally saw book form). What Roland Barthes would call the 'figure' of Rimbaud is the ghost at the banquet of literature: his radical rejection of poetry (not of writing, as Graham Robb makes clear: correspondence from Rimbaud's last 15 years constitutes a significant share of his output) has been appropriated by literary history as his most enduringly poetic act. ...Appropriately to value this new biography, which I believe to be superior to all its predecessors in English or French ...one of Robb's further ascendancies over the earlier biographers is to discern in Rimbaud's transactions with literature (and with colonial imperialism) his great range of intonation - from, in the early work, an 'exaggerated conformity to common aspects of puberty,' to a scathing sense of humor, which is the effective key to Rimbaud's universe throughout (Verlaine being 'the ideal sidekick,' Robb concedes, 'the whimpering Laurel to Rimbaud's ludicrously ambitious Hardy'), to the last words of the dying 37-year-old amputee from his hospital bed in Marseilles, astonishingly congruent to Frank O'Hara's poem 'To the Harbormaster.' 'Please therefore send me the tariff of services from Aphinar to Suez,' Rimbaud dictated to his sister Isabelle. 'I am completely paralyzed, and so I wish to embark in good time. Tell me at what time I must be carried on board.' He died the following morning at 10, and the rest is not silence but the noise of our attempts to answer the question Why did he stop? and the even more teasing question Why did he start? Robb's superb book will not supply answers, but it will make such questions irrelevant to a luminous yet explicit vision of the continuous life of a man who willfully placed himself, as De Quincey once said of Coleridge, 'in collision with all the interests that were in the sunshine of the world.'" - Richard Howard Click here to order $25

93945 [Jean-Paul Sartre] Sartre, Jean-Paul (trans. Quintin Hoare) War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War November 1939-March 1940 Verso, London, 1983. First edition. Octavo; hardcover; black boards with gilt spine-titling; 366pp. Minor wear; previous owner's name in ink; faint spotting to text block edges. Dustwrapper rubbed with mild edgewear. Very good. Click here to order $50

14809 [Jerome K. Jerome] Jerome, Jerome K. (Introduction by Joseph Connolly) My Life and Times - Folio Society edition The Folio Society, London, 1992. First printing. Octavo; hardcover, full decorated cloth, with gilt spine titling; 223pp., with 16 monochrome plates. Minimal wear. Slipcase lightly worn. Near fine. Laid in: a promotional brochure for "Three Men in a Boat". Click here to order $30

83759 [John Keats] Roe, Nicholas John Keats Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2012. Octavo; hardcover; 446pp. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. "Nicholas Roe has come in for some stick for claiming in this impressive life of the poet that 'Ode to a Nightingale' is 'one of the greatest recreations of a drug-inspired dream-vision in English literature', but if you find this hard to swallow, Roe's determination to make us look again at the Keats we think we know is admirable. Like Coleridge or de Quincey, Keats was an opium addict, Roe claims, because laudanum (freely dispensed by Guy's hospital, where Keats trained as a surgeon) eased the pain of his constant sore throat, a symptom of the TB that would kill him at 25 (he also might have hastened his death by self-medicating with mercury, wrongly believing he had syphilis). Here is a less innocent, more physically robust Keats than the sickly boy of legend or Shelley's otherworldly Adonais; a pugnacious poet, who in childhood preferred fighting to reading; he was confident, sensual, sexually active, but also rootless, mercurial and morbid. Roe even makes a virtue of Keats's suburban upbringing, raised on the edgy 'darkling thresholds' of London." - Ian Pindar, The Guardian. Click here to order $25

202997 [John Milton] Campbell, Gordon, & Thomas N. Corns John Milton Life, Work, and Thought Oxford University Press, London, 2008. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 488pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; spotting and toning to text block and page edges. Very good to near fine in like dustwrapper. This book re-examines scrupulously the writings and the life records of John Milton, in the context of a proper understanding of the recent developments in seventeenth-century historiography. Milton's thought has often been too simply described. The approach here is to interrogate more sceptically notions like puritanism, republicanism, radicalism, and dissent. A more complex story emerges, of Milton's culturally rich but ideologically conformist early decades, and of his radicalisation during the later years of Laudianism. We track the internal dynamics of English puritanism in the 1640s and the impact that has on his own convictions. In the 1650s Milton's thought and beliefs were reconciled to the role as public servant. In the 1660s a renewed confidence carried him towards the completion of his greatest project, Paradise Lost, and his final years were ones of creative fulfilment and renewed political engagement. Amid the discontinuities occasioned by shifting political circumstance, by the exigencies of polemical context, and the diversity of genres in which he wrote, Milton emerged as a major political thinker and significant systematic theologian, as well as the most eloquent prose writer and most accomplished poet of the age. A more human Milton appears in these pages, flawed, self-contractory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning, as well as the literary genius who achieved so much. Click here to order $25

206386 [John Shaw Nielson] Hewson, Helen John Shaw Nielson a life in letters Melbourne University Press, Carlton South Vic., 2001. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 503pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates and many illustrations likewise. Very minor wear. Dustwrapper. Near fine. Neilson (1872-1942) is one of Australia's finest and best-loved lyric poets. This comprehensive selection of letters to, from and about him fills a long-felt need, providing a vivid personal and social history. Helen Hewson has chosen and edited her material from more than a thousand existing letters, most of which have not been published previously. This complex poet participated in an intricate network of literary relationships and literary production, and it is only through reading the letters that one realizes the degree to which he reflected on his own and other people's poetry and writing. Click here to order $25

86571 [Jorge Luis Borges] Williamson, Edwin Borges A Life Viking/Penguin Books Inc., New York NY, 2004. Octavo; hardcover, with metallic blue spine titling; 574pp., with many monochrome plates. Very minor scuffing to dustwrapper. Near fine. Click here to order $25

8776 [Judith Wright] Wright, Judith (Patricia Clarke, ed.) Half a Lifetime Text Publishing, Melbourne Vic., 1999 First edition. Octavo; hardcover, with blind-stamped spine titles; 296pp., with 16pp. of monochrome photographic plates. Minor wear; text block and page edges toned. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed and sunned along the spine panel; now backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected by non-adhesive film. Very good to near fine. In this luminous memoir, Judith Wright takes the reader on an intimate journey into the first half of her life. She tells how her stern forebears became prominent pastoralists in northern New South Wales, and describes with stunning clarity the landscapes she grew up in. She remembers her first encounters with words and the emergence of her consciousness of self. She movingly describes her mother's death. And she recounts her resolution to escape from this world she loved in order to be free. Click here to order $20

84860 [Leo Tolstoy] Bartlett, Rosamund Tolstoy A Russian Life Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Inc., Boston MA, 2011. Octavo; hardcover, quarter bound in cloth with gilt spine titling; 544pp., with many monochrome plates. Minor wear. Tiny tear to the head of the dustwrapper spine panel; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. "Worth the wait... Her deep and easy familiarity with her subject and the period permits Bartlett to touch on both the thinkers and writers who engaged Tolstoy, while getting to the essence of the spiritual power that informs his work." - Publisher's Weekly Click here to order $30

99856 [Leo Tolstoy] Berlin, Isaiah The Hedgehog and the Fox An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, 1953. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 86pp. Moderate wear; rolled and boards slightly fanned; text block edges toned and top edge dusted; offset to the endpapers; previous owner's pencilled inscription to the front pastedown; scattered foxing to the preliminaries; some inked marginalia. Dustwrapper rubbed, sunned and edgeworn; previous owner's name in ink to the front flap; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Good to very good. "The Hedgehog and the Fox", a title referring to a fragment of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public, reprinted in numerous editions. Of the classification that gives the essay its title, Berlin once said "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously." Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include William Shakespeare). Click here to order $300

72264 [Lewis Carroll] Fisher, John (ed.) The Magic of Lewis Carroll Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., London, 1973. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 288pp., with many monochrome illustrations and diagrams. Moisture damage to the lower board edges, not extending to the text block; board top edges sunned; previous owner's ink inscription to the half title; minor offset to the endpapers and scattered spotting to the preliminaries; text block edges toned with some spotting; light bumping to the corners and spine extremities. Price-clipped dustwrapper is lightly rubbed with some minor edgewear and spotting to the verso; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Newspaper article 'The Curious Case of Lewis Carroll' by Morton N. Cohen laid in. There is a good story about Queen Victoria enjoying Alice's Adventures in Wonderland so much that she asked for a first edition of the author's next book. Two years later a beautifully wrapped package arrived, containing an inscribed copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry. Sadly, the story isn't true. To his adoring readers he was Lewis Carroll, the sweet-natured writer who wandered through life with a head full of stories. To his long-suffering colleagues in Oxford he was the Rev Charles Dodgson, the prickly mathematician who walked around with a poker-straight back and a head full of algebra. The two were like strangers who merely happened to inhabit the same skin. This book is its own definition of the sense of wonder first evident in the activities of the boy wizard and later providing the protective cloak essential as refuge from an adult life that came to encompass loneliness and left-handedness, a stutter and seemingly unconquerable shyness. In amassing for this purpose as comprehensive a collection of Carroll's original games and puzzles as possible including various magic tricks and gambits, which, while not originated by himself, would certainly have been familiar and therefore of some influence on him, manifestations of that same basic desire to fascinate and intrigue, whether his audience be young friend or high-table colleague. In 1885, Carroll's diary entry admits that 'never before have I had so many literary projects on hand at once'. He then proceeds 'for curiosity' to list fifteen separate projects from mathematical treatises with titles like Supplement to Euclid and Modern Rivals and Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers to a projected bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for young girls to 'A Collection of Games and Puzzles of my devising, with fairy pictures by Miss E G Thomson. This might also contain my "Memoria Technica" for dates, etc., my "cipher-writing", scheme for Letter-registration, etc, etc.' Editor John Fisher was himself a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and has previously published his own Magic Book. Click here to order $30

12151 [Lewis Carroll] Gattegno, Jean (trans. Rosemary Sheed) Lewis Carroll Fragments of a Looking Glass from Alice to Zeno George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1977. Octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine titles; 327pp., top edge dyed blue, with a monochrome portrait frontispiece and many illustrations likewise. Minor wear; some small coffee stains to the text block fore-edge; very light offset to the endpapers. Dustwrapper is lightly rubbed with an old price sticker to the front flap. Very good to near fine. Arranged alphabetically, in suitably Dodgsonian fashion, and ranging from Alice herself to Zeno's Paradox, which greatly exercised Dodgson the Logician, Jean Gattegno has divided his book into thirty-seven 'fragments' which reflect the multifarious facets of Dodgson's looking-glass life. Occultism, Oxford, Religion, Photography, Politics, Prudery, Queen Victoria and Vivisection are but a few of the labels that appear on the fragments. Dodgson's love of trains; his preoccupation with the need for a separate women's university; his voluminous and carefully catalogued correspondence; his rules for letter writing; his advocacy of pure mathematics as a pastime and as 'a source of comfort in periods of mental trouble'; his friendship and quarrel with Tennyson; his life-long difficulties with illustrators; his love of childhood and adoration of small girls... are amongst the themes and topics touched on in the course of the book. Click here to order $30

212923 [Lewis Carroll] Wilson, Robin Lewis Carroll in Numberland His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life; An Agony in Eight Fits W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York NY, 2008. First US edition (with the misprint on the publications page): octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with gilt spine-titling; 239pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece diagrams and many illustrations likewise. Mild wear; boards fanned; a small mark to the upper board; text block edges lightly toned. Dustwrapper a little rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Numberland is concerned with the relatively unexplored territory of Lewis Carroll's contributions to mathematics and logic, rather than his contributions to literature. The two sometimes coincided rather brilliantly. Queen Victoria loved his Wonderland, and wrote to the publisher requesting that she be sent the very next book that Carroll produced. Carroll being Dodgson, of course, she was duly sent 'An Elementary Treatise on Determinants'. Wilson relates, "Queen Victoria was not amused." The book is organised into eight "fits" to mimic those of one of Carroll's great works, each focusing on a different area of his life or work. Several of these chapters concentrate on Carroll's puzzles and games, as well as tricky logical gymnastics. The solutions and references to further reading are included in a notes section. Click here to order $18

216883 [Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett] Mellen, Joan Hellman and Hammett The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett HarperCollins, New York, 1996. First edition. Octavo hardcover; quarter bound blue papered boards with dark blue cloth spine and gilt spine titling; 872pp., b&w plates, untrimmed page edges. Mild spotting to text block edges. Very good to near fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. "Dependent upon Lillian Hellman's writing income at the close of his life after drinking and wenching himself into literary and sexual impotence, Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, has survived as an artist while she is remembered as a self-loathing liar. A compulsive fantasist in such late-life memoirs as Pentimento, from which the film Julia was made, Hellman (1905-1984) outlived her turbulent and romanticized intimacy with Hammett (1894-1961), creator of hard-boiled private-eye fiction, and even outlasted her reputation for the realistic melodramas (The Little Foxes) that Hammett coached her in composing. When Hellman died, she was even more unlikable than in her glory days as hit playwright and parlor radical of the 1930s and 1940s. Mellen evokes a ""she-Hammett"" (the term is irritatingly overused) who boozed and whored and talked tough in imitation of her sometime lover, but neither one of the pair compels much empathy as the drinking and the infidelities and the devotion to Stalinism pile up, while the narrative weaves in and out of fixable time. Yet the years matter little. The subjects' exhibitionistic literary and showbiz coteries on both coasts remain tiresomely self-indulgent. Of her image-enhancing fabrications, the aged Hellman would boast to a friend: "That's what writing is for." Mean, dishonest, insecure and possessive, Hellman comes off much worse than Hammett, who went to prison during the McCarthy years, served hitches in both world wars and fashioned elegantly spare tough-guy novels. Morally insolvent, the pair are viewed unsentimentally yet sympathetically in Mellen's carefully researched account of their lives." - Publisher's Weekly Click here to order $30

43458 [Lord Berners] Berners, Lord A Distant Prospect A Sequel to First Childhood Constable Ltd., London, 1945. First edition: octavo; hardcover; 126pp., with a frontispiece and three plates. Minor wear; lightly toned text block edges. Dustwrapper slightly discoloured with edgewear and light chipping; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $60

200284 [Lytton Strachey] Holroyd, Michael Lytton Strachey - two volumes "The Unknown Years, 1880 -1910" & "The Years of Achievement, 1910-1932" Holt Rinehart & Winson, New York NY, 1968. First American edition: octavo; hardcovers, with gilt spine titling and upper board decorations; 1,229pp. [475pp. + 754pp.], with a colour frontispiece and many monochrome plates. Minor wear only; previous owner's name in ink. Dustwrappers very slightly browned along spines, some chipping along upper edges from the tight-fitting, slightly rubbed, slipcase. Very good. Click here to order $50

99402 [Marquis de Sade] Hesse, Jean-Pascal Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade Assouline, New York NY, 2014. Quarto; hardcover, with upper board decoration and decorated endpapers; 189pp. colour and monochrome illustrations. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Man of letters, philosopher, and politician, the Marquis de Sade is one of the most controversial figures since the eighteenth century, but recently psychology, theatre, cinema, and literary criticism have shed new light on his life and works. Lacoste Castle in the South of France, one of the properties of the Sade family, became the refuge of the Marquis between periods of incarceration. Thanks to the Sade family opening its archives for the first time, historian Jean-Pascal Hesse examines Sade's story through previously unpublished documents and imagery and walks in the Marquis' footsteps in his beloved chateau. Click here to order $25

92580 [Mikhail Bulgakov] Cockrell, Roger (trans. & ed.) Mikhail Bulgakov Diaries and Selected Letters Alma Classics/Alma Books Ltd., London, 2013. Octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine-titles; 276pp., with 8pp. of monochrome plates. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Born in Kiev from a line of priests, Mikhail Bulgakov is perhaps the most famous of modern Russian writers, through the simple expedient of having his magnum opus unpublished for over twenty years. Bulgakov graduated from the First Kiev Gymnasium where he developed a passion for Russian and European literature. He enlisted with the Red Cross as a medic during the First World War and was sent to the front, where he was seriously wounded on at least two occasions, leaving him afflicted by chronic pain for the rest of his life. During the Russian Civil War, he and his brothers sided with the White Army and fought for the Czar: eventually he fled with his family to the Caucasus from where his brothers were invited to return to Paris as doctors; Bulgakov himself was barred from emigrating as he had contracted typhus during the wait. He never saw his family again. Returning to Kiev, he began his writing career in earnest completing several short novels inspired by H. G. Wells and his own experiences in battling morphine addiction to quell his chronic abdominal pain. He then moved to Moscow and continued to work as writer; however many of his pieces attracted a severe mauling from the critics on the basis that he was "too anti-Soviet". His material was banned and by 1929 his career was in ruins. Marrying for the third time in 1932 to his muse, Yelena Shilovskaya, he began to secretly write his greatest novel, "The Master and Margarita". Continuing to find no support for his writing efforts, he wrote a play entitled "Batum" which praised Stalin effusively; Stalin himself banned this work but, remembering an earlier play of Bulgakov's which he had seen and enjoyed, he found a position for the embattled writer at the Moscow Art Theatre. Denied the ability to freely express himself even here, he wrote to Stalin in despair asking that he be allowed to emigrate from Russia if no work could be found for him; Stalin rang him personally to ask if indeed he wanted to leave Mother Russia, to which Bulgakov replied (inevitably) that a Russian writer cannot live outside of his homeland. Bulgakov died of Bright's Disease in 1940, leaving his greatest work completed behind him, in secret. It was finally published in 1967 and has since been recognised as one of the greatest works of literature of all time. Click here to order $20

64945 [The Mitfords] Mosley, Charlotte (ed.) The Mitfords Letters Between Six Sisters Fourth Estate/HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2007. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and rules and decorative endpapers; 834pp., with 32pp. of monochrome plates and many illustrations likewise. Moderate wear; shaken; spine extremities softened; text block and page edges toned with some spots. Dustwrapper rubbed and scuffed with some edgewear (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. Click here to order $25

214081 [Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens] Tomalin, Claire The Invisible Woman The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens Viking/Penguin Group Ltd., London, 1990. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with metallic-pink spine titling; 317pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; toned and spotted text block and page edges. Dustwrapper with mild edgewear; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $30

200267 [Noel Coward] Coward, Noel (ed. Barry Day) The Letters of Noel Coward Methuen Ltd., London, 2007. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling and a red ribbon; 780pp., with monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; faint spotting and a few small marks to text block edges. Dustwrapper. Very good. Click here to order $40

12163 [Nora Joyce] Maddox, Brenda Nora A Biography of Nora Joyce Hamish Hamilton Ltd./Penguin Books (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Ringwood Vic., 1988. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 589pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Mild wear; slightly shaken; spine heel softened; text block top edge lightly dusted; a small ink stain to the text block fore-edge; some minor marks to the flyleaf. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $28

98827 [Oscar Wilde] Hyde, H. Montgomery (Introduction & ed.; Foreword by Sir Travers Humphreys) The Trials of Oscar Wilde - Notable British Trials series "Regina (Wilde) v. Queensberry" & "Regina v. Wilde and Taylor" William Hodge and Company Ltd., London, 1948. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and a blind-stamped upper board decoration; 384pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece and 16pp. of plates likewise. Moderate wear; rolled; spine extremities softened; spine and upper board sunned; corners bumped; text block edges spotted; offset to the preliminaries; retailer's bookplate to the front pastedown; previous owner's name in ink to the flyleaf; a trimmed section of the front dustwrapper flap tipped-in to the flyleaf; some dog-eared pages; light scattered foxing throughout. Lacks dustwrapper. Good. Click here to order $40

210272 [Pablo Neruda] Eisner, Mark Neruda The Poet's Calling Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, New York NY, 2018. Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with silver-gilt spine titles and a blind-stamped upper board decoration; 628pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. The most definitive biography to date of the poet Pablo Neruda, a moving portrait of one of the most intriguing and influential figures in Latin American history. Few poets have captured the global imagination like Pablo Neruda. In his native Chile, across Latin America, and in many other parts of the world, his name and legacy have become almost synonymous with liberation movements, and with the language of erotic love. "Neruda: The Poet's Calling" is the product of fifteen years of research by Mark Eisner, writer, translator, and documentary filmmaker. The book vividly depicts Neruda's monumental life, potent verse, and ardent belief in the "poet's obligation" to use poetry for social good. It braids together three major strands of Neruda's life - his world-revered poetry; his political engagement; and his tumultuous, even controversial, personal life - forming a single cohesive narrative of intimacy and breadth. The fascinating events of Neruda's life are interspersed with Eisner's thoughtful examinations of the poems, both as works of art in their own right and as mirrors of Neruda's life and times. The result is a book that animates Neruda's riveting story in a new way - one that offers a compelling narrative version of Neruda's life and work, underpinned by exhaustive research, yet designed to bring this colossal literary figure to a broader audience. Click here to order $24

214068 [Patrick White] Marr, David Patrick White A Life Jonathan Cape, London, 1991. First UK edition. Octavo; hardcover; black boards with gilt spine titling; 727pp., with 32pp. of monochrome plates. Minor wear; well-browned text block and page edges. Illustrated dustwrapper with wear to spine panel extremities and corners (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. Marr's pellucid study. Click here to order $25

90407 [P.G. Wodehouse] Ratcliffe, Sophie (ed.) P.G. Wodehouse A Life in Letters W.W. Norton & Co., New York NY, 2011. Octavo; hardcover; 602pp. Dustwrapper. New. Remainder. "A scrupulously edited collection... The penultimate letter gives the recipe for Jeeve's celebrated morning-after restorative, but this relishable collection will work equally well." - Christopher Hirst Click here to order $28

44631 [P.L. Travers] Lawson, Valerie Mary Poppins, She Wrote The Life of P.L. Travers Simon & Schuster Inc., New York NY, 2006. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with illustrated boards; 401pp., with monochrome plates. Mild wear; previous owner's name in ink; remainder mark to upper text block edge. Mild edgewear to the dustwrapper. Very good. Mary Poppins flew into the lives of the Banks family and secured her place in the hearts of generations of children. Published in 1934, the book was instantly hailed as a classic. By the time Julie Andrews graced the screen in Disney's 1964 adaptation, Mary Poppins was a household name. The quintessentially English nanny was conceived by an Australian, Pamela Lyndon Travers, whose troubled childhood bore little resemblance to the cheery optimism that is associated with the beloved children's tale. Fiercely independent, Travers left Australia for London in 1924 to work as a journalist and found herself rubbing shoulders with literary elites such as W.B. Yeats and T.S. Elliot. Travers famously clashed with Walt Disney, reluctantly selling him her film rights, and then slamming the resulting movie as 'all fantasy and no magic'. Like her mysterious character, Travers remained inscrutable and enigmatic to the end of her ninety-six years. Valerie Lawson's detailed biography provides a glimpse into the mind of a writer who fervently believed that 'Everyday life is a miracle'. Click here to order $24

89363 [Rainer Maria Rilke] Rilke, Rainer Maria (Jesse Browner, trans.) Letters to Merline, 1919-1922 Robson Books Ltd., London, 1990. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 155pp. Mild wear. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed and sunned along the spine panel. Very good to near fine. How uniform in character is the vast mass of Rilke's correspondence! The translator, in an introduction to the Letters to Merline which, in spite of occasional extravagances, is of great help in giving the reader his bearings, offers a pithy variant of the general verdict in describing the immense outpouring as a whole as the waste-paper basket of Rilke's emotions. Never was a poet more worshipful of his poet's vocation or more deliberate as a letter-writer in stoking the fires of his poetry. The mood and the sentiment of Rilke's correspondence, above all the correspondence with the women of his amours or amorous inclinations, bear all the marks of inward cultivation, of rapt pursuit of his "obligation" to art. It is not so much that the temper of his letters is unvaryingly poetical, though often in a cloudy and high-flown way, as that they so plainly serve his self-dedication to poetry. Click here to order $18

54600 [Robert Louis Stevenson] Knight, Alanna (ed.) R.L.S. in the South Seas An Intimate Photographic Record Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh Scotland UK, 1986. Quarto; hardcover; 192pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; previous owner's bookplate. Dustwrapper. Near fine. In June 1888 Robert Louis Stevenson and his family sailed through San Francisco's Golden Gate, heading for the perils of the Pacific and the cannibal islands. Among the equipment they carried with them were a camera and a magic lantern. Stevenson intended illustrating his history of the South Seas - the excuse for his cruise. Very few of the photos survive, although constant references to photography sessions are contained in his letters. In RLS in the South Seas, these remarkable photographs are published, many for the first time, together with linking narrative from Stevenson's letters and essays written at sea and during his visits to the islands. Click here to order $24

216880 [Ross Macdonald] Macdonald, Ross Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past Capra Press, Santa Barbara, 1981. First edition. Hardcover, octavo; red cloth boards with black spine titling; black endpapers; 129pp. Mild rubbing to board edges and corners; slight toning with faint spotting to text block edges with lightly worn dustwrapper edges and very slightly sunned spine panel, now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $35

207044 [Rupert Brooke] Harris, Pippa (ed.) The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, 1909 -1915 Bloomsbury Plc., London, 1991. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 302pp. Mild wear; spotting to text block edges. Rubbed dustwrapper with mild edge wear; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $25

89362 [Rupert Brooke] Keynes, Sir Geoffrey (ed.) The Letters of Rupert Brooke Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1968. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles on a brown label; 709pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Moderate wear; mild softening of the spine extremities; light toning of the text block edges. Price-clipped dustwrapper is well-rubbed and edgeworn (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. Click here to order $45

65565 [Samuel Beckett] Knowlson, James & Elizabeth [ed] Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett A Centenary Celebration Arcade Publishing, New York NY, 2006. Octavo; hardcover; 313pp. with monochrome plates. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. In life, Beckett was notoriously reticent, preferring to let his work speak for itself. In the first half of this collection, he reveals many of his inner thoughts and honest opinions about his life, writing, friends, and colleagues in candid interviews published for the first time in this book. He discusses his friendship with James Joyce and his role in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Also included are newly discovered photographs of Beckett as a young boy, as a teacher, as best man at a friend's wedding, and with painter Henri Hayden. In the second half, friends and colleagues share their memories of Beckett as a schoolboy, a teacher, a struggling young writer, and a sudden success in 1953 with the appearance of Waiting for Godot. Readers will be enchanted by the poignant remembrances by those who knew him best, worked with him most closely, or admired him for his enduring influence: including actors Hume Cronyn, Jean Martin, Jessica Tandy, and Billie Whitelaw and fellow playwrights and authors Edward Albee, Paul Auster, E. M. Cioran, J. M. Coetzee, Eugene Ionesco, Edna O'Brien, and Tom Stoppard. Click here to order $20

213560 [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] Holmes, Richard Coleridge Early Visions Viking/Penguin Books, New York, 1990. First US edition. Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in cloth with gilt spine titles and decorative endpapers; 409pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece and 16pp. of plates likewise. Mild wear; remainder mark to the text block bottom edge; top edge dusted; mild offset to the preliminaries. Dustwrapper is lightly rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $30

95547 [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] Mays, J.C.C. Coleridge's Father Absent Man, Guardian Spirit Friends of Coleridge, Bristol UK, 2014. Quarto; hardcover, with gilt upper board and spine titling; 873pp., with many colour and monochrome plates. Minor wear only; a small bump to the head of the spine and one or two superficial scratches on the lower board. No dustwrapper as issued. Very good to near fine. Limited edition, published by subscription. Appendices include genealogical summaries, bibliographies and a select subject index. Click here to order $500

213274 [Simone de Beauvoir] Beauvoir, Simone de (Quentin Hoare, ed. & trans.) Letters to Sartre Radius/Random Century (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Milson's Point NSW, 1991. First printing. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 531pp. Minor wear; text block top edge dusted; previous owner's ink inscription to the flyleaf. Dustwrapper is lightly rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $30

92790 [Stefan Zweig] Prochnik, George The Impossible Exile Stefan Zweig at the End of the World Other Press, New York NY, 2014. Octavo; hardcover, with silver gilt spine titling; 390pp., untrimmed, with monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper. Near fine. "From his new home in the 'lush perch' of nearby Petropolis, the emigre Viennese bestseller relished the warmth, grace and tolerance of Brazil's 'new kind of civilisation', with its blessed absence of racism. Meanwhile, in the Nazi-occupied Europe that the literary superstar had fled, total war had reached its deep midnight. With his younger second wife Lotte Altmann chronically ill, his peers scattered and the 'posthumous existence' of the exile closing in, his depression deepened. A few days later, he took a fatal dose of barbiturate; Lotte followed him. Although their double suicide seemed to ratify Goebbels' grim jest about artistic emigres as 'cadavers on leave', the shock stiffened the resolve of Zweig's many friends in the anti-Hitler diaspora. The New York Times ran a heartfelt editorial: not the refugees but the Nazis, it said, were the real exiles from civilisation, 'branded with the mark of Cain'. By the end of 1942, after El Alamein and Stalingrad, a faint daybreak began. Zweig would never see that dawn. Thoughtful, evocative and quietly gripping, George Prochnik's book about Zweig's exemplary exile does not offer a cradle-to-grave biography. Oliver Matuschek, whom he fully credits, did that job superbly in 2011. Rather, The Impossible Exile braids this hugely successful writer's ordeal of dispossession and homelessness after 1934 with the trajectory of Prochnik's own family - like Zweig's, Viennese Jews who moved to the Americas. He also travels in his subject's footsteps and crafts aphorism-studded reflections on his work, life and times. If such a hybrid genre presents pitfalls for the writer, it can also deliver rich rewards. Rebecca Mead, for one, reaped them in her fine book about a lifetime's journey with George Eliot, The Road to Middlemarch. If this equally subtle blend invites that comparison, it may not be pure coincidence. George Prochnik and Rebecca Mead are husband and wife. .. Prochnik can pay homage to this big-hearted, hyper-active visionary with a 'genius for friendship' without making him the equal in exile of Thomas Mann or Sigmund Freud - whose eulogy Zweig delivered at Golders Green cemetery in 1939.Typically, it fell to Zweig - the ultimate networker and stalwart volunteer - to do the job. Up the road in Hampstead, Prochnik speaks with Lotte's niece Eva, who as a child lived with the couple. Now in her eighties, Eva can look back on a long, rich career in the health service and as a mentor for young musicians. Despairing solitude snuffed out Zweig's own hopes. Yet his books endure - re-translated recently to loud acclaim - while those he nurtured would heal a wounded world. Through the lives and minds of others, the exile rebuilt his home." - Boyd Tonkin Click here to order $28

95495 [Ted Hughes] Bate, Jonathan Ted Hughes The Unauthorised Life Fourth Estate/HarperCollins Publishers (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Pymble NSW, 2015. Octavo; hardcover, with silver gilt spine titling and illustrated endpapers; 662pp., with many monochrome and colour plates. Minor wear only. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. "As Jonathan Bate acknowledges in the last chapter of his biography of Ted Hughes, the poet liked to say that literary biographers were 'vampiric', and that famous authors should act together to frustrate their researches. But Hughes did not follow his own doctrine. He took care to preserve thousands of his manuscripts, including journals and letters. Some he sold to Coca-Cola-endowed Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, whose plentiful funds helped make his last years affluent. Many others he left to the British Library, a rich trove for a biographer. He can hardly have wanted them left unread. The main service that Bate has done is to read this huge mass of material with a scholar's ability to date and arrange it. His biography is a first report on what lies in wait in the archive. It is, however, a report that has been hindered and constrained. As has been widely reported, he began his work on a 'literary life' with the support of the Ted Hughes estate, controlled by the poet's widow Carol. Late in the day this support was withdrawn: evidently, his researches were not purely 'literary' enough. Permission for any substantial quotation from Hughes's writing was also withdrawn, and Bate's 'Unauthorised Life' has to grapple with this ban... Some letters have been published, but very many remain unknown. Bate thinks Hughes one of the greatest of literary letter and journal writers; his letters are compared to those of Keats. Like Coleridge, in his journals he was a dedicated and brilliantly sharp-eyed recorder of material that might or might not one day get hammered into poetry, and even the tiny pieces that Bate gives us glitter. In the later years there were good deeds - support for the Arvon Poetry Foundation, campaigns to clean up Devon's rivers - and much hobnobbing with Tory cabinet ministers and members of the royal family. At least Hughes had an excuse: the ruling classes gave him access to prime stretches of fishing river, and fishing had taken over from sex as his ruling passion. Yet Eros still held some sway: Bate tells us that in his late 60s there was a lover whom Hughes visited on his trips to London, and whom he was seeing when he was taken mortally ill. It is evident that Hughes carried on telling himself tales from myth about the desires that drove him. This scrupulous and lucid biography makes it all seem like muddle and self-deception, tormenting to himself and the many who loved him." - John Mullan Click here to order $30

210802 [Ted Hughes] Hughes, Ted (Christopher Reid, ed.) Letters of Ted Hughes Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 2007. First edition. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 756pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Minor wear; a slight bump to the spine head. Dustwrapper. Near fine. Click here to order $35

201059 [Thomas Hardy] Tomalin, Claire Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man Viking Press/Penguin Books (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Camberwell Vic., 2006. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 486pp., with 16pp. of monochrome plates. Mild wear; binding very slightly rolled; text block and page edges lightly toned. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $25

36890 [Virginia Woolf] Lee, Hermione Virginia Woolf Chatto & Windus, London, 1996. Hardcover, octavo; green boards with gilt spine titling and decorated endpapers; 892pp., monochrome plates. Rubbing to board edges and corners and one or two small marks on text block edges. Very good in mildly rubbed dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. "Hermione Lee sees Virginia Woolf afresh, in her historical setting and as a vital figure for our times. Her book moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions - the impact of her childhood, the cause and nature of her madness and suicide, the truth about her marriage, her feelings for women, her prejudices and obsessions. This is a vivid, close-up portrait, returning to primary sources, and showing Woolf as occupying a distinct, even uneasy position with 'Bloomsbury'. It is a writer's life, illustrating how the concerns of her work arise and develop, and a political life, which establishes Woolf as a radically sceptical, subversive, courageous feminist. Incorporating newly discovered sources and illustrated with photos and drawings never used before, this biography is a revelation -informed, intelligent and moving." Click here to order $30

44392 [Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson] Nicolson, Nigel Portrait of a Marriage Illustrated edition Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, 1990. Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 223pp., with many monochrome and full-colour illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. The book relates to Sackville-West's marriage to writer and politician Harold Nicolson. Two chapters are written by Sackville-West. They are centred on herself and her passion for Violet Trefusis for whom she abandoned Nicolson, Vita's bisexual husband and her two children, Nigel and Ben. Three chapters were written by Nigel and present the sexual and emotional life secrets of his mother: "I did not know Violet. I met her only twice, and by then she had become a galleon, no longer the pinnacle of her youth, and I did not recognize in her sails the high wind which had swept my mother away. I did not know that Vita could love like this, had loved like this, because she would not speak of it to her son. Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did, because she was tempted, because she was weak. She was a rebel, she was Julian [Vita's alter ego], and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?" Sackville-West writes mostly about herself and her emotions. Nicolson writes about his father and the love between him and Vita, that grew more and more important for them as their life progressed, and was the base to which each of them returned after Vita's strong passions for other people, including the famous Virginia Woolf and Harold's adventures with men. Nicolson stresses the liberal nature of Vita's and Harold's views and actions about marriage and sexuality in the early years of the 20th century, but also brings forward Vita's intense snobbishness and coldness regarding the lower social classes. Click here to order $30

206563 [W.H. Auden] Carpenter, Humphrey W.H. Auden A Biography George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1981. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine titles; 495pp., with 24pp. of monochrome plates. Mild wear; text block edges toned and top edges dusted; mild offset to the endpapers; some dog-eared pages. Dustwrapper rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $25

68071 [William Butler Yeats] Yeats, William Butler Synge and the Ireland of his Time with a Note Concerning a Walk through Connemarra with Him by Jack Butler Yeats T.M.MacGlinchey for the Irish University Press, Shannon Co. Clare Ireland, 1970. Octavo; hardcover; 43pp. Minor wear; sticker ghost to front pastedown. Near fine. Facsimile of the 1911 Cuala Press edition. Click here to order $60

81707 [William McGonagall] Watson, Norman Poet McGonagall The Biography of William McGonagall Birlinn, Edinburgh Scotland UK, 2010. Octavo; hardcover; 306pp., monochrome plates. Near fine in like dustwrapper. Known to millions throughout the world as the worst poet ever, William McGonagall is a literary legend whose execrable rhymes and terrible scansion have assured him a very special place in the poetic pantheon. Yet little has been known - until now - about the life of this self-styled 'tragedian and poet'. A hugely entertaining biography of Scotland's other national poet. Click here to order $20

91801 [William S. Burroughs] Odier, Daniel & William Burroughs The Job Interview with William Burroughs Jonathan Cape Ltd. London, 1970. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 192pp. Minor wear; offsetting to endpapers with sticker ghost to the front free endpaper; toned and spotted text block edges. Dustwrapper edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $80

63529 [William Shakespeare] Bryson, Bill Shakespeare HarperPress, London, 2007. First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 200pp. Minor wear; some marks to the endpapers. Near fine in like dustwrapper. Click here to order $20

45214 [William Shakespeare] Duncan-Jones, Katherine (Ed.) Shakespeare's Life and World - Folio Society edition The Folio Society, London, 2004. First printing. Quarto; hardcover, quarter-bound with a cloth spine and illustrated boards, with decorated endpapers; 308pp., with many full-colour and monochrome illustrations. Near fine in a like slipcase. Anthology which intermingles passages from the playwright's own works with accounts from contemporaries and related documents. Illustrated with paintings and engravings. Click here to order $30

44839 [William Wordsworth] Barker, Juliet Wordsworth A Life in Letters Penguin Books Ltd., London, 2002. Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 367pp., with many monochrome plates. Minor wear; embrowned and spotted text block and page edges. Mild wear to dustwrapper edges; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Barker's judicious selection shows us Wordsworth the writer in a way not possible in a biography that seeks to explain the life as well. Click here to order $25