May 8, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Original blue boards, spine lettered in silver. With the supplied dust jacket, designed by Fritz Wegner. Housed in a dark blue quarter morocco solander box made by the Chelsea Bindery. Boards browned at edges and a little marked, tips worn, a good copy in the jacket with chips at head of spine and folds.
First UK edition, presentation copy inscribed by the author in red ink on the front free endpaper, “To Joyce Williams, who nursed my mother so selflessly and beautifully. With gratitude, J. D. Salinger. New York, N.Y. June 21, 1974.” Salinger’s mother was born Marie Jillich, in 1891 in Atlantic, Cass County, Iowa, and died in June 1974, the same month as the inscription. She had adopted Judaism and the name Miriam on her marriage. Her husband Sol, Salinger’s father, had died earlier the same year, in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Apparently Salinger showed little emotional response to their deaths, even within his own family. He reported having dealt with his father’s death with a “minimum of crap and ceremony” and, when his mother died, he neglected to tell his own daughter Peggy; she read about it in the newspaper (Raychel Haugrud Reiff, J. D. Salinger, 2008, p. 35). This presentation inscription, made in a copy of the UK edition presumably from his own library, shows a little more emotional response to her passing. On the rear endpaper, Joyce Williams has re-presented the book: “To my brother Eric McBean. From his sister Joyce Williams. May 17, 2003. Brooklyn NY. 11233”.
May 8, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Elephant folio. Original full vellum portfolio, titles to front cover gilt, with the original ivory silk ties laced to a large bow at the spine and with two pairs of ivory silk fore-edge ties skilfully supplied to match. In the original green cloth-sided card box with full-page printed paper label to front. Housed in a custom green quarter morocco solander box. 12 large proof-size colour plates mounted in mats, with captioned tissue guards, by Rackham. The box a little worn in places, but a fine copy, a remarkable survival of this luxurious presentation.
Deluxe extra-limited edition, number 13 of 100 copies signed by the publisher and engraver on the limitation page and each plate signed on the mount by the artist, bound in full vellum. According to Latimore & Haskell, although Rackham was supposed to sign all 100 copies, the artist confessed that he had signed only about 20 of them. Copies numbered 101 to 600 were issued in a half vellum portfolio with green cloth sides; none of these was signed by Rackham. The Peter Pan Portfolio reproduces 12 of Rackham’s favourite illustrations at their original size. Barrie wrote enthusiastically of Rackham’s originals, which he had seen exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, “I like best of all the Serpentine with the fairies, and the Peter in his night-gown sitting in the tree. Next I would the flying Peters, the fairies going to the ball (as in the ‘tiff’ and the fairy on cobweb) – the fairies sewing the leaves with their sense of fun (the gayest thing this) and your treatment of snow” (Ray 329). Barrie’s comments seemingly influenced Rackham’s selection, as the portfolio includes all the images the author mentioned.
May 8, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Small quarto. Specially bound for the publisher by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in red crushed morocco, spine gilt tooled with a fish motif (closely resembling that used on copies in the vellum binding), concentric gilt panels on sides with fish motif at corners, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, three-line gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers. Housed in a red quarter morocco slipcase. Colour frontispiece and 11 coloured plates with captioned tissue guards, black and white illustrations in the text, by Rackham. Attractive bookplate of Cyril Sturla (a captain in The Cheshire Regiment during the Great War). An excellent copy.
Deluxe edition, number 1 of 757 copies signed by the artist; this is one of a putative 10 “special copies” in a luxury binding commissioned by the publisher and containing an original signed pen-and-ink and watercolour sketch by Rackham (this one captioned “Handle him as if you loved him” – Walton’s dictum for handling a live frog before impaling it on a hook) and showing an amusing riparian scene with a frog pleading with a gentleman, while a typically Rackhamesque anthropomorphic tree looks on. It was George Harrap who hit on the idea of a “Rackham special”, the most exclusive format of Rackham’s books. From The Vicar of Wakefield on, Harrap held back the first dozen or so copies to be specially bound, as here, and asked Rackham to add a unique original watercolour sketch to the limited page. The first few copies were usually reserved for the publisher and his family; only a handful were available to the public. Describing his artistic method for these “specials”, Rackham pointed out that “my little sketches must inevitably be of a light hearted or joking nature… They have to be spontaneous and free handed. The nature of the paper is such that there can be no preparatory drawing and no alterations”.
May 8, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Quarto (262 x 186 mm). Specially bound for the publisher in green full morocco by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, gilt lettered and panelled spine, single-line gilt lozenge on sides with gilt corner ornaments from designs by Rackham, top edges gilt, others untrimmed, three-line gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers (the original pictorial endpapers bound in after binder’s blanks). With the publisher’s card slipcase (with hand-numbered label). Colour frontispiece and 11 colour plates mounted on heavy white paper with captioned tissue guards, black and white illustrations in the text, by Rackham. Slight signs of wear at extremities of joints. An excellent copy.
Deluxe edition, number 3 of 460 copies signed by the artist. This is one of ten “special copies” reserved by the publisher from the total edition, presented in a specially commissioned luxury binding decorated in gilt with tools designed by the artist, and including a full-page original pen-and-ink and watercolour drawing by Rackham (signed “Arthur Rackham 1935”), showing a seated elderly man reading a hair-raising story, while his black cat spits at the Devil, who emerges from behind his armchair. It was George Harrap who hit on the idea of a “Rackham special”, the most exclusive format of Rackham’s books. From The Vicar of Wakefield on, Harrap held back the first dozen or so copies to be specially bound, as here, and asked Rackham to add a unique original watercolour sketch to the limited page. The first few copies were usually reserved for the publisher and his family; only a handful were available to the public. Describing his artistic method for these “specials”, Rackham pointed out that “my little sketches must inevitably be of a light hearted or joking nature … They have to be spontaneous and free handed. The nature of the paper is such that there can be no preparatory drawing and no alterations”.
May 8, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Ian Smith of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Two works bound in one volume, octavo (188 x 114 mm). Contemporary marbled paper boards, mottled calf spine, red morocco label.
First edition (“Leyde” issue) of the book that gave the Physiocrats their name, one of the most important and original works on political economy to be published before The Wealth of Nations, bound together with its important companion piece, one of the scarcest of Dupont’s works, and probably one of the most successful publications promoting physiocracy. The work is partly based on Le Mercier de la Rivière’s L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des Sociétés politiques, which Adam Smith referred to as “the most distinct and best connected account of this doctrine”. Schumpeter, in his discussion on the physiocrats, calls Dupont “by far the ablest of the lot” (p. 226) and Palgrave notes; “If Quesnay was the father of physiocracy, Dupont was its godfather, for he gave it its name by the publication of his Physiocratie… a collection of Quesnay’s articles, which the editor introduced by a Discours.”. Quesnay presented a copy of his book to Adam Smith, who described him as “ingenious and profound, a man of the greatest simplicity and modesty”, while pronouncing Quesnay’s system to be “with all its imperfections, perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy”. François Quesnay (1694–1774) was the court physician to Louis XV, and his notion of a circular flow of income throughout the economy was influenced by the contemporary discovery of blood circulation through the human body. He believed that trade and industry were not sources of wealth, and instead argued that the real economic movers were agricultural surpluses flowing through the economy in the form of rent, wages and purchases. Quesnay argued that regulation impedes the flow of income throughout all social classes and therefore economic development; and that taxes on the productive classes, such as farmers, should be reduced in favour of rises for unproductive classes, such as landowners, since their luxurious way of life distorts the income flow.
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