The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Oscar Wilde. First Edition, London: David Nutt, 1888.
Presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Quarto. Original white boards, spine lettered in black, front cover lettered in red with design in black by Jacomb Hood, edges untrimmed. Housed in a brown linen chemise and red quarter morocco slipcase. Title page printed in red and black, 3 plates after Walter Crane (in two states), head- and tailpieces and decorations by Jacomb Hood. Boards somewhat marked and soiled, titles rubbed with partial loss of a few letters, endpapers browned, some very faint marginal marks and spotting to a few pages.
First edition, trade issue. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his friend and benefactor Minnie Adela (“Tiny”) Schuster on the front free endpaper: “To Tiny, from her sincere friend Oscar Wilde. Sept. 89.” The daughter of a wealthy Frankfurt banker, Adela Schuster lived with her mother in a large villa in Wimbledon called Cannizaro and spent the winters in Torquay, where she met Wilde: there Schuster frequented the Pre-Raphaelite circle of Lady Georgina Mount-Temple, whose house Babbacombe Cliff Wilde leased in November 1892. Known to her intimate friends as “Tiny”, she observed that Wilde “would not naturally know me by my real Christian name, which he has never heard in his life – he has never heard me called – or seen my name signed – by any other name than my nickname – too ridiculous to mention”. Charmed and fascinated by Wilde’s company, she wrote, “Personally I have never known anything but good of O. … and for years I have received unfailing kindness and courtesy from him – kindness because he knew how I loved to hear him talk, and whenever he came he poured out for me his lordly tales & brilliant paradoxes without stint and reserve. He gave me of his best, intellectually, and that was a kindness so great in a man so immeasurably my superior that I shall always be grateful for it.”
Wilde was deeply touched by the kindness and devotion shown in return by Schuster throughout his trial and imprisonment. At the time of his second trial, aware of his strained financial circumstances and his mother’s ill-health, Schuster sent him a cheque for £1,000, “assuring him that it cost her little even in self-sacrifice and declaring that it was only inadequate recognition of the pleasure she had through his delightful talks”. According to Frank Harris, Wilde told him that, “a very noble and cultured woman, a friend of both of us, Miss S–, a Jewess by race tho’ not by religion, had written to him asking if she could help him financially, as she had been distressed by hearing of his bankruptcy, and feared that he might be in need.”
Following Wilde’s imprisonment, she wrote to his friend More Adey, “Could not Mr. Wilde now write down some of the lovely tales he used to tell me? … I think the mere reminder of some of his tales may set his mind in that direction and stir the impulse to write.” Wilde responded to her wish via a letter to Adey: “I was greatly touched by the extract from the letter of the Lady of Wimbledon. That she should keep a gracious memory of me, and have trust or hope for me in the future, lightens for me many dreadful hours of degradation or despair.”
Schuster continued to work towards petitioning for Wilde’s release, and alleviating his suffering in prison, to the extent that she was even prepared to support bribing the doctor at Reading (though she considered the plan a dubious one) to certify the dangerous state of Wilde’s mental and physical health. In November 1896, Wilde asked Robert Ross to send “whatever of remembrance and reverence she will accept, to the Lady of Wimbledon, whose soul is a sanctuary for those who are wounded, and a house of refuge for those in pain.”
Though they never met again after his imprisonment, Wilde paid tribute to her in his De Profundis, as “one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble kindness to me both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment have been beyond power and description: one who has really assisted me … to bear the burden of my troubles more than anyone else in the whole world has”.
Poems, John Keats. First Edition 1817. London: C. & J. Ollier, 1817.
You can view our first edition of Poems here.
Presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo (164 × 96 mm) in fours. Contemporary green calf, richly gilt and blind tooled spine, dark red morocco label, three-line gilt border on sides enclosing blind vine leaf roll-tool, blind five-line border and central straight-grain panel, gilt turns-ins, marbled edges and endpapers. Housed in a green cloth solander box. Wood engraving of Edmund Spenser on title page. Bound without the half-title and blank; joints rubbed, pale stains on front cover, one or two leaves a little proud, four of the sonnets marked with a bold pencilled cross in the margin (”Written on the day Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison”, sonnet IX that opens “Keen, fitful gusts are whis’pring here and there”, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, and “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”).
First edition of Keats’s first book. Poems was published on 3 March 1817 by Charles and James Ollier, who were already publishing Shelley. The first of a mere three lifetime publications, it is a work of mainly youthful promise – Keats had appeared for the first time in print less than a year earlier, with a poem in the radical weekly The Examiner on 5 May 1816. The 1817 Poems attracted a few good reviews, but these were followed by the first of several harsh attacks by the influential Blackwood’s Magazine, mainly by critics who resented Keats’s avowed kinship with the despised Leigh Hunt. The best-known poem in the book is the sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration” (Colvin), and described by ODNB as “an astonishing achievement, with a confident formal assurance and metaphoric complexity which make it one of the finest English sonnets. As Hunt generously acknowledged, it ‘completely announced the new poet taking possession’ (Hunt, Lord Byron, 249)” (ODNB).
Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower. First Edition, 1948. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1948.
You can view our first edition of Crusade in Europe here
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Publisher’s deluxe presentation binding of full red morocco by Gaston Pilon (Garden City, NY), gilt banded spine, Eisenhower’s “flaming sword” motif in gilt and silver on front cover, top edges gilt, others untrimmed, map endpapers. 16 plates, numerous maps in the text. Spine just lightly sunned. An excellent copy.
First edition, one of 35 copies specially bound for presentation, generously inscribed by Eisenhower to the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his wife: “For The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Mrs Atlee . With best wishes for a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year. From their friends Mamie D. and Dwight D. Eisenhower December, 1948”. Books inscribed by Eisenhower on behalf of himself and Mamie are most uncommon. Eisenhower has also signed at the foot of the facsimile of his famous D-Day Order of the Day.
This copy is number 31 of the edition of 1,426 copies. The unusual limitation suggests that 26 copies were originally planned for personal presentation, but in 1949 a number of US newspapers reprinted an interview with the binder, French-born Gaston Pilon, in which he stated that one of his prized possessions was a letter from Eisenhower thanking him for hand-binding “35 special, goatskin leather-covered volume” of this book.
Eisenhower’s account of his war is widely thought to be one of the finest American military biographies, the New York Times considering that it gave “the reader true insight into the most difficult part of a commander’s life.”
A most desirable copy, linking two wartime leaders: Attlee served as deputy prime minister under Churchill from February 1942 to May 1945, succeeding him as prime minister in July 1945, following the Labour landslide. Eisenhower would have been impressed with Attlee’s military record during the Great War, when he served as an officer in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and France; ODNB describing the War as providing Attlee “with a test of leadership which he grasped fully”.
Fourth Collected Edition, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer. Geoffrey Chaucer, London: for Wyllyam Bonham, 1550, presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
You can view our first edition of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer here
Folio (286 × 178 mm). Late 19th-century full grosgrain morocco in antique style by Hayes of Oxford, tooled in blind and decorated in gilt, marbled endpapers, wide turn-ins richly gilt, gilt edges. Housed in a morocco-backed folding case. Printed in black letter in two columns. Title page and separate title for “Romaunt of the Rose” within decorative border, woodcut of the Knight on B1r, woodcut of the Squire on E6v, woodcut initials throughout. Provenance: John Hawes (contemporary ownership inscription inked to title and colophon); Thomas A. Hendricks of Indianapolis (bookplate); Rosenbach Collection (typed label on printed header); Sylvain Brunschwig (morocco bookplate); Paul Peralta-Ramos (small Japanese-style inkstamp); the collection of Cornelia Funke, author of the Inkheart trilogy. Joints tender, lacking final blank, mild browning, dampstaining to first gathering and to margins of last gathering, head of B1 shaved just touching foliation, tear to f. 90 affecting a few letters of text, pen-trials to outer margin of f. 227, discreet ink doodles to woodcut of Knight, “Squier” inked to scroll on woodcut of same, last leaf coming away at head, overall a very good copy.
Fourth collected edition, one of four variants each with a different publisher’s name in the colophon: the others were Richard Kele, Thomas Petit, and Robert Toye. Pforzheimer notes that, to judge from the relative numbers of extant copies, it is probable that they shared equally in the edition. The woodcuts of the pilgrims that had first been printed in Caxton’s 1483 edition are here replaced by two new cuts, of The Knight and The Squire, which were then reprinted in later black letter editions through to 1602. The history of the woodcuts is traced by David R. Carlson, “Woodcut Illustrations of the Canterbury Tales, 1482–1602,” The Library, 6th ser., 19 (1997): 25–67.
Winner Take Nothing, Ernest Hemingway. First Edition, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
First edition, first printing, presentation copy to his third wife Martha Gellhorn, inscribed by Hemingway in pencil on the front free endpaper “To /M. Gellhorn my old Professor in aesthetics from E. Hemingstein” and further inscribed by him “PS 1939 I love you EH”. The leaf is also blindstamped with Martha Gellhorn’s London address. The book was presumably given by Hemingway to Martha Gellhorn around the time of their first meeting in Florida towards to end of 1936 and inscribed for the second time by Hemingway when in 1939 they moved together to Cuba, where they married on 22 November 1940.
Recent Comments