LEWIS, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950.

LEWIS, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950.

Presented by Ben Houston of Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine in silver. With the pictorial dust jacket. Housed in a green quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery.

First edition, first impression. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the first blank, “Elisabet Neumann, with kind regards from C. S. Lewis, 26/10/50”. Extremely rare: Lewis was an infrequent presenter of books, and, although signed copies have occasionally appeared on the market, we are aware of no other presentation copy of this first published title in the Narnia series ever appearing in commerce.
The inscription is dated ten days after first publication, which was 16 October 1950. We know that Lewis was in Magdalen College, Oxford, on the day of presentation, Thursday, 26 October 1950, as it happened to be the same day that he wrote the first of his Letters to An American Lady (published in 1967).

KEATS, John. Poems. 1817.

Presented by Sammy Jay of Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Octavo. Original light brown boards, printed paper label to spine. Housed in a green quarter morocco solander box made by the Chelsea Bindery. With the half-title. Wood engraving of Edmund Spenser on title page. Spine darkened, light wear to spine and board edges, rear inner hinge cracked but holding, front joint and tail of spine professionally repaired. An excellent copy.

First edition of Keats’s first book in the original boards. 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).

GALILEI, Galileo. Opere, divise in quattro tomi…. 1744.

Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Rare Book Specialist at Peter Harrington.

Four volumes, quarto (268 x 195 mm). Uncut in contemporary drab boards (“carta rustica”), paper spine labels added at a later date, preserved in two black morocco backed cloth boxes. Engraved portrait frontispiece by Zucchi to vol. I, engraved printer’s device on titles, head- and tail-pieces, with numerous woodcut initials, engravings and figures in the text, and two plates, one folding. Short tear to rear joint of volume I, occasional light marginal damp marking and dust soiling, a few short marginal tears, a tiny work track across one line of the final leaf of volume III; a very good copy in original condition.

First complete collected edition of Galileo’s works, the third overall, and the first to include the Dialogo, along with other material published here for the first time. Galilei’s Opere, first published in two volumes in 1656 in Bologna by Carlo Manolessi, was reprinted with some revision and the addition of a third volume in 1718 in Florence by Tommasso Bonaventure, assisted by Guido Grandi and Benedetto Bresciani. This third edition, edited and annotated by Giuseppe Toaldo, includes for the first time, added as the fourth volume, Galilei’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi. New to this edition are the Trattato del modo di misurare con la vista, Ventitrè lettere a diversi, delle quali sedici al Micanzio e tre al Gualdo, Problemi vari e pensieri vari, and the Dialogo.

FLEMING, Ian. Casino Royale. 1953.

Presented by Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Octavo. Original black boards, titles to spine red, heart device to front cover in red, bottom edge untrimmed. With the illustrated dust jacket.

First edition, first impression, first state dust jacket (without the Sunday Times review on the inner front flap). “According to the Cape archives, 4,760 sets of sheets of the first printing were delivered, but only 4,728 copies were bound up. Many of these went to public libraries and we believe that less than half of the first printing was sold to the public. The jacket is genuinely rare in fresh condition” (Biondi & Pickard, 40).

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. Two draft manuscripts and typescripts… 1936].

Presented by Ben Houston of Peter Harrington Rare Books.

First draft: 20 leaves, various sizes (largest 330 214 mm), partly triple-spaced typescript with pencil holograph amendments, completed in pencil manuscript. Second draft: 9 pages (US Letter: 11 8.5 ins), double-spaced typescript with pencil holograph amendments.

Two original drafts, the first draft and the second and final draft, for Fitzgerald’s short story “I Didn’t Get Over”, written in summer 1936 and published in Esquire magazine that October. The most noticeable differences between the two drafts are at the beginning and end of the piece. The title is slightly changed: in the first draft, it is “I Never Got Over”; in the second, that is amended in manuscript to “I Didn’t Get Over”. In the story, a former army captain who failed to make it to the front in the First World War confesses his responsibility for a training-camp accident that claimed the lives of several soldiers. At the end, the second draft, Fitzgerald adds in pencil the coda that makes the identity of the army captain clear: “I was that captain, and when I rode up to join my company he acted as if he’d never seen me before. It kind of threw me off—because I used to love this place. Well—good night.” The summer of 1936 was a difficult one for Fitzgerald. From February to April 1936, he had published the essays in Esquire magazine that are now well known as The Crack-Up, the articles that helped invent confessional journalism, in which he revealed the collapse of his life and his hopes, and his determination to save himself with his art. A year or so later, he would begin work on his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. From the collection of James B. Hurley. In 1936, having just graduated from Brown University with a BA in English, Hurley left his hometown of Providence, RI and went to North Carolina looking for work. He answered a classified ad to do some typing and found himself employed by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hurley typed Fitzgerald’s manuscripts, which were written in longhand, on a Remington portable designed for double-spaced work. Fitzgerald wanted his his first drafts triple-spaced in order to edit between his lines, so Hurley turned the roller and carriage by hand to provide three spaces. Hurley worked for Fitzgerald for nine months, at the end of which Fitzgerald inscribed three of his novels to Hurley and presented him with the manuscripts of two short stories, this and the Civil War story, “The End of Hate”. Both were sold at auction, Sotheby’s New York, 4 Dec. 1996, the present two drafts as lot 88. The story was first published in book form in the posthumous collection Afternoon of an Author (1957).