Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
- Windows back to the Summer(s) of Love – fine copies of the original festival programmes for Monterrey (1967) and Woodstock (1969).
These two imaginatively produced programmes emblemise in book form the two most famous music festivals of the 1960s, which in themselves need no introduction. What is interesting is that, where the “Monterrey International Pop Festival” programme is a treasure trove for pure musicos – full of band photographs, extraordinarily lysergic advertisement art from record companies, some articles on the music scene (Paul Jay Robbins) and the making of the festival (Derek Taylor), occasional literary effusions by the likes of Al Cooper, and a cheerful endorsement drawing from Sgt. Pepper – the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair” posits itself as something more. Subtitled an “Aquarian Exposition: 3 days of peace & music”, the 1969 Festival had a much more millennial ambition. The programme offers a more gesamt corpus, with original poems introducing the acts (Joan Baez, Canned Heat, Ravi Shankar, Jeff Beck, The Band, Credence Clearwater, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Incredible String Band, and Jefferson Airplane – whose page also incorporates the instructions and material for an actual fold-up airplane) as well as political articles (one entitled “the hard rain’s already falling”, addressed to those wishing to be “hip to what been going down lately” with “The Law and Order apes and this senile dinosaur we call a government” by Abbie Hoffman, author of Revolution for the Hell of it). Both, indeed, utilise Shakespeare, but Monterrey’s choice, from The Merchant of Venice, is tellingly aesthetic: “Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music / creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night, / become the touches of sweet harmony”, whereas Woodstock’s, an obscure selection from Henry VIII, expresses the distinctly political idealism of the event: “every man shall eat in safety / under his own vine, what he plants; and sing / the merry song of peace to all his neighbours.”
- Flight of Fancy – the original maquette for Cecil Beaton’s classic wartime propaganda photobook Winged Squadrons (1942).
This is one of my all-time favourite items here at Dover Street. What is extraordinary about Winged Squadrons (1942) is the way that Cecil Beaton, as an official war photographer, turned what could have been a fairly quotidian government-sponsored propaganda piece into a work of high sensibility and style.
The photographs are masterpieces, and here we have 12 original prints with Beaton’s hand-written captions and the censor’s stamps passing them for publication, all accompanied by the final hand-corrected typescript. A hugely-valuable piece, both in the history of photography, and as a historical document of the Second World War.
It is particularly amusing to note, in comparing the original photographs with those in the finished publication, that the censors have cropped the following image to hide the nude pin-ups on the airman’s bunk room wall.
- The Biggest Little Prince – an extremely rare presentation copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s much loved classic, with an original drawing.
This is one of the very best “Children’s Books” that Peter Harrington Rare Books has ever handled – though of course The Little Prince is much more than a book for children. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s enchanting parable of what is worst and best in human nature was composed and published in New York while war was raging in Europe.
There was a very small window of time between its publication in April 1943 and the day when its author departed to serve (and die) as a pilot in the Free French Airforce in North Africa and Corsica. Consequently, presentation copies are extraordinarily rare – but here we have one, and what a one! It is inscribed with an original drawing of the Little Prince, looking very sullen having landed on Earth, complaining pessimistically (in French, but I translate): “You’d have to be completely crazy to have chosen this planet. It is only pleasant at night when the inhabitants are asleep…” Wonderfully, the author here counters his character’s misanthropy: “The Little Prince was wrong. There are on earth some inhabitants whose straightforwardness, sweetness, and generosity of heart make up for the avarice and egotism of the others. For example, Dorothy Barclay”.
The fortunate recipient was an assistant to New York Times reporter Helen Lazeroff, a friend of Saint-Exupéry. While composing the chapter in which the Little Prince meets a madly acquisitive businessman counting stars as if to own them, the author became curious as to how many stars can be seen from Earth. He asked his friend Lazeroff, whose assistant picked up the matter and telephoned the Hayden Planetarium. She provided the answer (9,096 to the naked eye, according to a recent Yale University calculation) to Saint-Exupéry, and for her “straightforwardness, sweetness and generosity of heart” she was gifted this exceptional book and its moving inscription.
