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London : Constable & Co., 1929. First edition in English : the London issue of the 1928 American sheets. Alain-Fournier’s 1913 masterpiece – also known in English as “The Lost Domain” or “The Lost Estate” – translated by Françoise Roussel Delisle (1886-1974) and with a lengthy introduction by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), at whose instigation the translation was made. “The greatest novel of adolescence in European literature” (John Fowles). Memorably filmed in 1967 with Brigitte Fossey and Jean Blaise, and subsequently in 2006 with Clémence Poésy and Nicolas Duvauchelle.
Post 8vo (195 x 125mm). xxxii,306pp. Bound in an attractive recent half green morocco, banded and gilt; original cloth spine bound in at rear; a few faint spots, but otherwise a very good copy.

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London : Chatto & Windus, 1929. First edition. His first novel – a searing indictment both of war and of public and private hypocrisy, the text peppered with asterisks in place of words and phrases that his publishers, to his annoyance and astonishment, considered “at present taboo in England”. There are also satirical tilts at the literary establishment, with recognisable caricatures of Eliot, Ford, Lawrence and Pound. Orwell regarded it as “much the best of the English war books”, Wells was “moved deeply”, and for Wyndham Lewis it was simply “magnificent”. “Sheer, stark truth. They did not always like truth in the old days; they do not always like it to-day. You may not like it yourself, but there it is” (Ralph Straus in The Bystander, 25th September 1929).
Demy 8vo (22cm). (xii),440pp. Original black cloth, lettered in gilt; top edge pink; faint fringe of light discolouration to foot of boards; mild tanning of endpapers; a few faint spots to outer leaves, but otherwise a very good copy in the striking dust-jacket by Paul Nash (1889-1946) – the jacket with a few minor marks and creases, a couple of nicks and a short tear, but also very good. Small bookseller’s label of A. H. Spencer of Melbourne on front pastedown.

£360 (reduced from £500)

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London : Gerald G. Swan, (1947). First edition. “The winsome, but too aggressive blonde named Carrie really has nothing to do with the story. Not that Steve Brabazon had any objection to blondes qua blondes. But Carrie carried the principle too far”. Ames with a witty series of three interlinked stories, pre-dating his delightful Jane and Dagobert Brown murder mysteries.
Crown 8vo (20cm). (228)pp. Original blue cloth, blocked and lettered in gilt; a couple of tiny marks; slight tear to front free endpaper; the poor quality post-war paper slightly tanned, as ever, but a very good, sound and bright copy in the splendid dust-jacket – the jacket here in second state, with reduced price overlays on front flap and spine, but with just a single tiny hole and a touch of discolouration at head, a couple of minuscule nicks, and otherwise in very good, clean and fresh state.

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Paris : Les Editions Isis, 1931. First edition : a presentation copy, warmly inscribed to Pierre Varenne (Pierre-Georges Battendier) (1893-1961), the novelist and lyricist, and signed by all three co-authors – Josephine Baker, the first black superstar and later Resistance heroine; the Czech director and screenwriter, Felix de la Cámara, and Baker’s Sicilian husband and manager, the self-styled Count Abatino – “the no-account count”. A story of selfless giving, involving a millionaire’s son and the maid’s daughter. Illustrated with stylish Jazz Age images by the Russian artist Georges de Pogedaieff (1897-1971).
Post 8vo (20cm). [viii],(176),[iv]pp. Six plates. Vignettes in text. Original pictorial wrappers; slightly chipped at foot; some mild wear; text just lightly tanned, but overall a very good and largely unopened copy of a scarce and fragile item.

London : William Heinemann, 1911. First edition : the variant binding in smooth brown cloth, the spine lettered in upper and lower case. Just 2,150 copies were issued in this form, the remainder being put in a more robust library binding. “A diaphanous novel possessed of a delayed explosive charge that detonates today with surprising power ... the finest, and darkest, kind of satire: as intoxicating as champagne, as addictive as morphine, and as lethal as prussic acid” (Robert McCrum) – “Mr Beerbohm in his way is perfect” (Virginia Woolf).
Post 8vo (21cm). [viii],350,[ii]pp. Original brown cloth, lettered in gilt, and with the publisher’s device in blind on lower cover; a few faint marks and minor signs of age and use; mild tanning of endpapers, but overall a very good, sound, and rather better than usual copy. Book-label of a modern Connecticut collector.

£250 (reduced from £400)

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London : J. F. Bennet, 1892. Sixth edition. A popular and attractive map of the best-known stretch of Thames, produced by the City of London printer and stationer, John Frederick Bennet of Queen Street, manufacturer of “Wryte-eezy” stationery, and whose shop is illustrated among the numerous and entertaining advertisements. The map is accompanied by twenty pages of text, with notes on angling, boating, steam-launches, locks and tolls, with a distance-table, and an A-Z guide to the riverside towns and villages. First published in 1889.
Coloured lithograph on thin card, folding into a pictorial cloth case. Printed surface 744 x 185mm (approx. 29-1/4” x 7-1/4”). Very minor wear to folds; text pamphlet loose and slightly frayed, but still an attractive example. Just a single copy of this edition (Wisconsin) located in major libraries worldwide – and only a handful of copies of any of the multiple earlier and later editions.

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London : Methuen & Co., (1913). First edition. The further adventures of “The Card” – Edward Henry Machin stumbles into theatrical management in London and pursues Isabel Joy, the suffragette, to appear in his play. “There is no one in contemporary fiction so immense as Edward Henry Machin. He never wearies, because he always surprises and because Mr. Arnold Bennett never once errs in his presentation of him. ‘The Regent’ is as good, if not better, than ‘The Card’ and that is, indeed, saying a great deal” (The Globe, 12th September 1913).
Crown 8vo (20cm). (viii),(320)pp. Original cloth – the uncommon red variant – attractively blocked and lettered in gilt; a touch sunned; tiny mark to spine; endpapers lightly tanned; some spotting, mainly to edges and prelims, but overall a very good copy. Contemporary pencilled ownership inscription of Emily and Henry Catchpole (a bookbinder) of Richmond Road, Dalston.

£75 (reduced from £125)

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London : William Heinemann, 1900. First edition. Benson in the Balkans – a princess addicted to gambling, a rascally husband, a scheming prime-minister, and a son expelled from Eton – “We do not think Mr. Benson has written a more entertaining book” (Manchester Courier, 18th April 1900) – “He does it with marvellous cleverness and in fine literary style” (The Field, 21st April 1900).
Crown 8vo (20cm). [x],308 + 16pp advertisements. Original decorative sand cloth, blocked and lettered in black and red; a few faint marks; mild tanning of endpapers; just a touch shaken, but otherwise a very good and much better than average copy.

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[Amsterdam : Apud Iohannem Blaeu, 1647]. A delightful antique map of Dorset, decorated with ships and shields, the imposing cartouche flanked by bales of wool and hemp. Originally produced by the Dutch master mapmaker Joan Willem Blaeu in 1645, and here with the Dutch language text on the verso of the 1647 edition. “The Blaeus produced the finest maps of the 17th century. The general quality of design, execution, paper and colouring were unsurpassed” (Radford).
Copper line engraving on paper, with original hand colour. Engraved surface 382 x 502mm (approx. 15” x 19-3/4”). Slight furl to the original vertical fold; a couple of tiny marks, but overall in very good and clean state. A guaranteed genuine antique map.

£350 (reduced from £500)

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[London : for A. Churchill, J. Knapton & others, 1720]. An attractive antique map of the Bishopsgate area of the City of London – the whole length of Bishopsgate from north to south, extending down into Gracechurch Street, with the smaller streets to either side. The map is decorated with a baroque cartouche, and the names of seventy-one smaller side-streets and alleys are given in a keyed index. Originally produced by Richard Blome in the late seventeenth century, the map remained unpublished until the present version (with his name erased) appeared with the 1720 edition of John Stow’s “Survey of London”.
Copper line engraving on paper. Engraved surface 309 x 178mm (approx. 12-1/8” x 7”). In very good and clean state. A guaranteed genuine antique map. Adams 25/024. Hyde (Ward Maps) 25/1.

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London : Chatto & Windus, 1977. First edition. Signed by Dirk Bogarde on the title-page. “A most enviable piece of (largely) pastoral recall, nostalgic to the point of being aromatic with the smells, colours, sounds, characters of English pre-war rural life, further embellished by the author’s own pen-and-ink sketches, in the style of E. H. Shepard” (Birmingham Daily Post, 2 April 1977). The first and most celebrated of Bogarde’s sequence of autobiographies.
Medium 8vo (23cm). [xii],268pp. Photo plates and seventeen illustrations by the author. Original bright blue boards, ruled, blocked, and lettered in gilt; a few faint marks, but overall a very good, clean and sound copy in the jacket designed by the author, also very good.

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London : Archibald Constable, 1906. A standard set of “what remains the most famous biography in any language, one of Western literature’s most germinal achievements: unprecedented in its time in its depth of research and its extensive use of private correspondence and recorded conversation” (Gordon Turnbull in ODNB). Boswell on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), first published in 1791, and here edited by Augustine Birrell (1850-1933), retaining all the prefatory matter of the earliest editions.
Six volumes. Foolscap 8vo (170 x 104mm). Frontispieces. Bound in a most attractive near contemporary half polished calf, banded and prettily gilt, by John Ramage (1836-1911) & Co.; contrasting labels; top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; very lightly rubbed, but a very good clean and sound set.

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London : George Routledge & Sons, 1867 [i.e.1866]. First edition. One of a number of tales of derring-do written by the bookseller Anne Bowman of Richmond (Yorkshire) either side of 1860 – “A new work, from the pen of Miss Anne Bowman, full of adventurous excitement and hair-breadth escapes from all kinds of peril. A family are shipped from London to a West India island, where they pass through a never-ending series of vicissitudes enough to daunt the energies of the strongest amongst the members of it. No one can complain of monotony who peruses these spirit-stirring pages” (Bell’s Life in London, 24th November 1866).
Foolscap 8vo (17cm). [ii],446pp. Frontispiece and seven suitably dramatic plates by the Dalziel Brothers. Inset slip advertising the Broadway Magazine. Original pictorial cloth gilt; just faintly rubbed; spine just a touch sunned; one or two slight marks, but a very good example of the genre.

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London : Grant Richards, 1923. First edition. “The Virginiola Fraud”, “The Missing Actress Sensation”, and seven further mysteries featuring the all-seeing blind detective of Richmond. “As fresh ... as when he first appeared ... Mr. Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ and the late Jaques Futrelle’s ‘Thinking Machine’ perhaps run him rather close for the deputyship of the lamented Sherlock. Max probably has it with the average reader ... well above the ordinary standard by which fiction detectives capture magazine readers” (Yorkshire Post, 26th September 1923).
Crown 8vo (20cm). (320)pp. Original blue cloth, lettered in black; just a hint of rubbing and darkening, a couple of tiny marks, but a very good and sound copy.

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London : Jonathan Cape, (1946). First edition in English of the banned “Die Blendung” (1935), his first and only novel, translated from the German (under Canetti’s personal supervision) by Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-1997). A Head without a World, Headless World and The World in the Head.
Post 8vo (198 x 133mm). 464pp. Bound in a smart recent half black morocco, banded and gilt; marbled sides; a few slight marks and faint creases, but a very good copy.

£150 (reduced from £250)

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Edinburgh & London : William Blackwood & Sons, 1871. First edition. The founding fiction in the whole of the “imaginary wars” genre – a German invasion and conquest vividly envisioned in the wake of the lightning advances of the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian War. Letters to the newspapers having failed, Chesney, a distinguished army engineer, successfully took to fiction to publicise the ramshackle state of the British armed forces. Originally published in “Blackwood’s Magazine”, profoundly influential, and subsequently much reprinted.
Foolscap 8vo (18cm). 64 + 8pp advertisements. Bound in neat recent boards, paper label – retaining the original pictorial mauve wrappers; wrappers a little worn and faded; a few spots, but a nicely preserved example. Dated (1880) ownership inscription of Gaston Démarest – this Louis Gaston George Démarest (1869-1955), born in Guildford, eleven miles from Dorking, brought up by his widowed French mother, and subsequently to work in the Scottish and northern shipyards in the years building up to the Great War.

London : Cassell & Co., (1926). First edition. The third of the Father Brown volumes – eight short stories, including “The Oracle of the Dog”, “The Miracle of Moon Crescent” and “The Doom of the Darnaways” – “That nice old cleric, strange compost of guile and guilelessness, has already endeared himself to the public beyond the need of any new commendation. Here he is in excellent form, has never been in better; and one is delighted to observe that age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety. Not only can it not wither him, it cannot kill him; characteristically the book opens with the murder of Father Brown, followed by his instant resurrection” (The Sketch, 7th July 1926).
Crown 8vo (189 x 120mm). [viii],296pp. Bound in a smart recent half black morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; original cloth backstrip and upper cover preserved at rear; a few slight marks and spots, but overall a very good copy.

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London : Cassell & Co., (1927). First edition. The fourth of the Father Brown volumes – ten short stories and pieces, including “The Song of the Flying Fish” and “The Red Moon of Meru”. Dedicated to Father John O’Connor of Bradford – reputed to be the original of ‘Father Brown’ – and certainly the priest who guided Chesterton to catholicism.
Crown 8vo (188 x 119mm). [viii],(310),[ii]pp. Bound in an elegant recent half black morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; original cloth backstrip preserved at rear; a few very faint spots, but a very good copy.

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London : Collins for The Crime Club, (1940). First edition. A young and beautiful woman on trial for an apparently open-and-shut case of murder – Poirot sits in court. “All you need to know here is that Agatha has triumphantly done it again. The same infernal ingenuity, the same devilish double-crossing, the same old new twist, the same punch in the last pages. Be thankful she doesn’t take to murder in real earnest” (Daily Herald, 18th April 1940).
Crown 8vo (182 x 118mm). 252,[iv]pp. Bound in a smart recent half burgundy calf, banded and gilt; a few slight spots, but a very good copy in a pleasant binding.

£350 (reduced from £500)

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London : T. Fisher Unwin, (1919). First British edition : includes corrections to the text not incorporated in the New York edition, which appeared a little earlier in 1919. “One of the finest of his novels, and Dona Rita perhaps the strongest and most perfect woman character he has yet conceived” (Aberdeen Press, 16th February 1920). “If I were to be asked in which of Mr Conrad’s writings his genius shows itself at its highest power, I should answer without hesitation, in this the latest of them” (Sidney Colvin, The Observer, 1919).
Post 8vo (193 x 121mm). x,336pp. Bound (for Sotheran) by Bayntun-Riviere in an elegant recent half-blue morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; a couple of trifling marks, but a very good and clean copy in a handsome binding.

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London : Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830. First British edition. Alida de Barbérie is abducted by pirates – the brigantine “Water Witch” is pursued by Captain Ludlow. Set in and around the still half-Dutch New York of the early eighteenth century – the press was unanimous: “the mystery of the story, and the life and spirit of his characters, have, indeed, seldom been equalled, and is nowhere surpassed” (Morning Chronicle) – “Cooper, the American novelist, has no living superior” (The Scotsman). Precedes the American edition by two months, although a slightly earlier edition improbably published in Dresden is known in a handful of copies.
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (188 x 114mm). viii,(322); [ii],316; [ii],308pp. Bound, without the advertisement leaves, in a smart contemporary half blue-green calf, banded and gilt; red labels; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; a few internal marks and spots, but still overall an excellent set. With the contemporary armorial bookplate in each volume of the colourful William Edward Powell (1788-1854), Member of Parliament and Lord Lieutenant of Cardiganshire, and the later bookplate of the well-known collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016) in the first volume.

£500 (reduced from £750)

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London : Richard Bentley, 1840. First edition. The fourth of the Leatherstocking Tales (although the third in terms of chronology) – the Pathfinder (Hawkeye) escorts a young woman to the shores of Lake Ontario. “We are prepared to meet another escape through the woods, like that in ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ – another race over the waters, as in former sea romances – or another land siege, like the fearful leaguer of the blockhouse ... but in place of any one of these stirring passages, Mr. Cooper gives us all three. The interest of the story is unflaggingly maintained” (The Athenæum). “The most beautiful and natural, the simplest, the truest, and owing the least to mere art – of all Mr. Cooper’s novels” (The Atlas).
Three volumes. Royal 12mo (197 x 119mm). [iv],320,(v)-viii – the preface misbound at the rear; [ii],348; [ii],(340)pp. Bound, without final blanks, in a smart and unworn twentieth-century half dark green calf, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; occasional spotting and browning, a few slight creases, but overall a very good set. With the nautical bookplate of the distinguished collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016) in the first volume.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : Victor Gollancz, 1944. First edition. His uncommon first book – later published in the USA as “Obsequies at Oxford”. Gervase Fen making his first appearance in a witty and classical locked-room mystery with some theatrical types in wartime Oxford. “Whatever his true name is, he is most certainly a gentleman who knows Oxford backwards, forwards, and inside out. For his murders take place in the colleges, hotels and theatres of that city, and although these are in every case fictional, the calmer atmosphere of the Senior Common Room and the Porter’s Lodge is unmistakeably authentic” (The Sphere, 11th March 1944).
Crown 8vo (183 x 120mm). (160)pp. Plan. Bound, without half-title, in an elegant recent half green morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; original cloth backstrip preserved at rear; wartime paper lightly tanned, but otherwise a very good copy in an attractive binding.

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London : A. C. Fifield, 1908. First edition. The first appearance of the book which made Davies’ name – a tramp by road and rail on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. A work of “primitive splendour and directness” (Osbert Sitwell). “Another effect of this book on me is to make me realize what a slave of convention I have been all my life. When I think of the way I worked tamely for my living during all those years when Mr. Davies, a free knight of the highway, lived like a pet bird on titbits, I feel that I have been duped out of my natural liberty” – from the preface by George Bernard Shaw.
Crown 8vo (184 x 113mm). [2],xiv,(296),[viii]pp. Bound in a handsome recent half red morocco, banded and gilt, by Bayntun-Riviere; top edge gilt; marbled endpapers; trimmed a touch tight at head, but otherwise a very good copy in an attractive binding.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : John Pearson, 1873. First collected edition. Nineteen plays, including “The Gentle Craft” (i.e. “The Shoemakers’ Holiday”) – probably his most famous; “Satiro-Mastix”, his robust response to his friend Ben Jonson; “The Honest Whore”; the anti-papist “Whore of Babylon”; “Westward-Hoe” and “Northward-Hoe”; “The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt”, co-written with John Webster and originally known as “Lady Jane”; “The Roaring Girle. Or, Moll Cut-Purse”, co-written with Thomas Middleton; the mayoral pageants “London Triumphing” and “London’s Tempe”; “The Virgin Martyr”, co-written with Philip Massinger; “Match Mee In London”; “The Sun’s Darling”, co-written with John Ford; “The Witch of Edmonton”, etc. “Dekker’s writing does reveal a sustained compassion for society’s misfits and casualties ... incisive commentary on the social, political, and religious structure of London ... continuously productive under three monarchs ... survived poverty, plague, and prison” (John Twyning in ODNB). Carefully edited from surviving early editions, with extensive notes and a memoir by Richard Herne Shepherd (1842-1895).
Four volumes. Crown 8vo (178 x 110mm). xlviii,340; [iv],392; [iv],386; [iv],(452)pp. Bound in a later (twentieth-century) half green crushed morocco, banded and richly gilt, by Bayntun-Riviere; top edges gilt; just a touch sunned; a handful of spots, but a very good set indeed in a most attractive binding. With the pictorial nautical bookplate of the collector George G. Stevenson.

£360 (reduced from £500)

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[Paris] : Publié sous les auspices de La Société Internationale des Intérêts Commerciaux, pour les Chemins de Fer de l’État, par Devambez, [1930]. First edition. The well-known French playwright and screenwriter with a witty response to Anita Loos (1889-1981) and her “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1925). From the library of Anita Loos, with her delightful portrait bookplate by Frank Walts (1877-1941), and two small “From the estate of Anita Loos” stamps. “Four letters twenty two post cards two night letters and one cable from his sweet, sweet Annabel Flowers to her darling, darling George Sabran”. Produced as English-language promotional and publicity material for both French State Railways and a range of French businesses, with overt plugs for perfumes, dresses, resorts, hairdressers, hats, jewels, cars, hotels, restaurants, shoes, etc., and even Kellner the body-builder of the Champs-Élysée. A leaflet list of “firms recommanded [sic]” is loosely inserted.
Crown 4to (24cm). [64]pp. Coloured illustrations throughout. Original wrappers; just lightly rubbed and slightly bruised; a touch shaken; a hint of tanning, but otherwise a very good copy in the silver dust-jacket, lettered and decorated in red and black – the jacket similarly lightly worn and slightly bruised, with a short tear at head, but in good condition for a fragile survival. Just three copies (Bibliothèque Nationale, Cambridge, and California) traced in major libraries.

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London : Diprose & Bateman / Diprose, Bateman & Co., 1868-1876. First edition : the desirable later issue of about 1880, with the preliminaries of the second volume reset to include a nineteen-page memoir of the recently deceased author John Diprose by John Baker Hopkins (1830-1888) – “He knew everybody in St. Clement Danes, and everybody in St. Clement Danes knew him”. Diprose, local bookseller, “long known as a publisher, a printer and a dabbler in literature in that historical and important locality ... tells us all about St. Clement’s Danes: its antiquities, buildings, streets, courts, lanes and alleys; the nobility of wit, art and fashion that inhabited them in the olden time; and the thieves, highwaymen, debauchees, demireps, drabs and disgraceful dregs of pauperism and crime who succeeded them” (Weekly Dispatch, 2nd January 1869).
Two volumes. Foolscap 4to (22cm). iv,332,[ii], errata slip; (xxvi),[ii],(388)pp. Maps, plates (some folding), portraits, illustrations. Original decorative cloth gilt over bevelled boards; all edges gilt; just a touch sunned; some very slight wear to extremities; a few slight creases, but a very good and bright set of a handsome production.

£140 (reduced from £200)

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London : Methuen & Co., (1914). First edition. A splendidly produced and illustrated survey of “the treasures of beauty and antiquity that still survive in the City of London ... these relics should be seen, sketched, and described before they disappear”. With chapters on the oldest remains, the pre-reformation churches, the Wren churches, the Charterhouse, St. John’s Clerkenwell and Austin Friars, the Inns of Court, City palaces and houses, the City Companies, the London signs, and the river.
Crown 4to (26cm). (xvi),312pp. Colour frontispiece, and over 100 crisp and clear illustrations (many full page) by the architect Edmund Livingstone Wratten (1877-1925). Original decorative cloth gilt; top edge gilt; some very minor rubbing; some spotting of edges and prelims, but a very good, bright and sound copy.

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[Edinburgh? : G. Hamilton & J. Balfour, and A. Kincaid?], 1751. A single-sheet reduction of Dorret’s 1750 wall-map of Scotland - “a greatly improved map ... the basis of practically every map of Scotland for the next forty years ... for the first time a really good outline becomes available” (Moir). Drawn and engraved by Dorret at a scale of ten miles to the inch (1:6336), with a separate inset of the Shetland Isles. No publication details are given, but the earlier wall-map was advertised in Scotland by the Edinburgh booksellers Hamilton, Balfour and Alexander Kincaid, and they may perhaps be responsible for this smaller version.
Copper line engraving on paper, with original outline hand colour. Engraved surface 790 x 620mm (approx. 31” x 24-1/2”). Dissected and mounted on linen; trimmed to neatlines, as usual; a few marks and some minor spotting; some wear and holing to the linen of the folds, but overall in good state for an early map of this type. A guaranteed genuine antique map.

£250 (reduced from £500)

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London : T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. First edition. Beyond the early pamphlets and offprints, Douglas’s first book and his first venture into fiction. He later claimed that just eight copies were sold – a slight exaggeration, but close on 600 copies of the original 750 were still unsold in 1903 and almost certainly pulped. Contains fifteen short stories (including “Elfwater”, “Nocturne”, “The Devil’s Oak”, and “Belladonna”) as well as the fantasy femme fatale novella “Nerinda”, most of the former written in collaboration with his then wife, Elsa Fitzgibbon (1876-1916).
Crown 8vo (185 x 122mm). (viii),(248)pp. Bound in a most attractive mid twentieth-century full red morocco, banded and gilt, by William Root & Son of London; top edge gilt; red silk marker; original pictorial cloth upper cover preserved at rear; a few very minor signs of age and use; a few faint spots, but overall a very good copy in a fine binding.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911. First edition : although 1,500 copies were printed, 200 were sent to New York to make up the American edition – and 890 were later pulped, leaving a maximum of 410 surviving copies. “A new stage of intimacy in the Anglo-Italian love affair and one of the happiest of travel books” – Cyril Connolly citing this among his 100 Key-Books of the Modern Movement.
Crown 8vo (20cm). viii,302pp. Title-page in olive and red. Frontispiece and twenty-three plates. Map of Sorrento and Capri. Original olive cloth, blocked and lettered on upper cover in dark green, and blocked and lettered across spine in gilt; top edge gilt; lightly rubbed and very slightly worn; a few slight marks; two very faint horizontal creases to spine, endpapers a little tanned; some occasional spotting; just a touch shaken, but overall a very good and still bright copy of a notoriously difficult title. Connolly 20. Woolf A13a.

£250 (reduced from £400)

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[Amsterdam : François Halma, 1705]. A handsome prospect of London from the south – London bridge still with its houses, the new St. Paul’s prominent, and the Tower of London away to the right. Originally produced for the “Algemeene Weereld-Beschryving, nae de Rechte Verdeeling der Landschappen” by A. Phérotée de la Croix, published at Amsterdam in 1705.
Copper etching and line engraving on paper. Later hand colour. Engraved surface 200 x 269mm (approx. 7-7/8” x 10-5/8”). Trimmed a little tight; faint old vertical folds; a few very minor marks, but a good example of a scarce early view. A guaranteed genuine antique print.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : for Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1821. First edition : the second issue, with the footnote on p.9. Pierce Egan’s roaring and runaway success – racy, slangy, and riotous adventures among the highest of high life and the lowest of low life in Regency London – “In his particular line, he was the greatest man in England” (John Camden Hotten). The sparkling text which took the country by storm as it appeared in instalments between August 1820 and July 1821 is gloriously accompanied by the superb aquatints of the brothers Isaac Robert and George Cruikshank, many depicting recognisable London scenes.
Demy 8vo (216 x 139mm). xvi,376pp. Frontispiece and thirty-five Cruikshank plates, all with original hand colour. Three folding leaves of music. Woodcut illustrations in text. Bound, without half-title and advertisements, in an elegant later (mid twentieth-century) full crimson morocco, banded and gilt, by Bayntun-Riviere; all edges gilt; gilt turn-ins; marbled endpapers; a few minor marks and spots; two leaves neatly repaired, but a very good copy of Egan’s defining work.

SOLD

London : Hutchinson, (1993). First edition. Loosely inserted is Faulks’ printed compliments slip, inscribed and signed by Faulks to Peter Wilkinson, “for his edition of Birdsong”. His fourth and most famous novel, set before and during the Great War. Soon adapted for radio and the stage, with a television version in 2012, starring Eddie Redmayne and Clémence Poésy.
Medium 8vo (25cm). [viii],(408)pp. Original green boards, blocked and lettered in silver; faint number stamped on lower edge; mild adhesion marks to front free endpaper, where the compliments slip had been insecurely attached, but a very good copy in the Garner Russell dust-jacket – the jacket just a touch dusty, but also very good.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : George G. Harrap & Co., (1934). First jigsaw edition. An elegant Fletcher country-house mystery – the Ellingshurst diamonds go missing, a housemaid is murdered, and the mysterious tenant of the Dower House disappears. Originally published the previous year, but here reissued in the “Harrap Jig-Saw Mystery” series, with a pink tissue insert at p.236 demanding that the reader “Stop!”, followed by instructions to assemble the jigsaw puzzle contained in a compartment at the rear to reveal the culprit, and then to open up the pink-sealed final pages for the full denouement.
Crown 8vo (20cm). (3)-(252),[ii]pp. With all bar one of the 150 jigsaw puzzle pieces (lacking just one corner piece) and both halves of the pink tissue seal. Original orange cloth, blocked and lettered in black; faint strip of sunning at head; some spotting, mainly of edges and endpapers; some internal marks, but a good and still bright copy in the green and yellow dust-jacket – the jacket a little worn and creased, with a few marks, spots and short nicks, but a complete and uncommon survival.

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London : Jonathan Cape, (1969). First edition. Victorian Lyme Regis and the enigmatic Sarah Woodruff – a book for which the note on the dust-jacket about the pagination being correct is perhaps a necessary prelude. Filmed by Karel Reisz in 1981 with a Harold Pinter screenplay, Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, etc.
Post 8vo (21cm). (446),[ii]pp. Pictorial endpapers by Tom Adams. Original brown boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; top edge purple; a very good, clean and sound copy in the Adrian Brewin dust-jacket – the jacket just faintly tanned, a touch sunned at spine, as usual, and with some very mild rubbing, but also very good.

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London : Chatto & Windus, 1909. First edition. Dr Thorndyke, first of the modern forensic detectives, here appearing in eight stories, including “The Anthropologist at Large” and “The Blue Sequin”. Introduced in Freeman’s preface as “a somewhat new departure in this class of literature” – as indeed it was, with illustrations to back up the forensics. A Haycraft-Queen “cornerstone” of detective fiction.
Crown 8vo (20cm). (xii),288pp + 32pp inserted catalogue dated September 1908. Ten plates – six atmospheric studies by Henry Matthew Brock (1875-1960) and four “micro-photographs” of the evidentiary specimens. Plan. Facsimiles. Original pictorial cloth; a few faint marks; some very mild rubbing and wear; endpapers lightly tanned, but a very good copy of a major contribution to the field.

£260 (reduced from £400)

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Andoversford : Whittington Press (1982). First edition : limited to 175 numbered copies, signed by both author and illustrator. Thirteen poems from writer-publisher Gant, with five wood-engraved illustrations from Howard Phipps (b.1954), hand-set on mould-made paper at the Whittington Press.
Post 4to (265 x 190mm). [32]pp. Bound in a handsome designer binding of full chocolate morocco, with ivory inlays and closely worked gold tooling; just a touch sunned, but an excellent copy in its felt-lined and morocco-lipped slip-case.

£400 (reduced from £750)

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London : J. M. Dent & Sons, (1940). First edition. “Find your ideal woman and marry her opposite” – Gibbings forsakes the lonely atolls of the Pacific for a “narrow-minded and biased” journey down the Thames – illustrated with his distinctive wood-engravings.
Demy 8vo (223 x 148mm). x,(230)pp. Fifty wood engravings. Bound in a handsome designer binding from 2012 by Wendy Smith – full grey morocco, with onlays inspired by Gibbings’ work in brown and green; a touch sunned, a few faint spots to prelims, but otherwise a very good copy in its decorative slip-case.

£250 (reduced from £500)

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Oxford : Perpetua Press, (1993). First edition. Twenty-three poems by Robert Gittings, beautifully printed by Vivian Ridler at the Perpetua Press, each accompanied by a brass rubbing, from churches as far afield as Wensley in Yorkshire and Burghill in Herefordshire, by the poet’s daughter Clare Gittings – all finding their origins in a family tradition of Christmas cards. Foreword by Christopher Fry.
Demy 4to (283 x 203mm). [iv],(56),[iv]pp. Twenty-three full-page illustrations. Bound in a handsome 2009 designer binding By Chris Hicks – full blue morocco, with morocco hinges, silk headbands, etc., with gilt onlays and tooling on the front cover based on the Wensley angel; an excellent copy housed in its custom-made clamshell cloth box.

£650 (reduced from £1,000)

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London : William Heinemann, (1934). First edition. Greene’s first overtly political novel – “the injustice of man’s justice” – in some sense an inversion of the traditional detective story, as a communist London bus-driver awaits his hanging. “Mr Greene has a reputation for unconventional composition ... he has adopted methods more familiar in the cinema than in fiction. He uses close-ups and long shots and panoramas, and the action is seen through the camera-eye of each spectator in turn” (The Scotsman, 15th February 1934).
Crown 8vo (174 x 111mm). [viii],(276),[ii]pp. Bound in a smart recent half red morocco; original cloth backstrip preserved at rear; some spotting of edges, but a very good copy.

SOLD

London : William Heinemann, (1943). First edition. Greene’s powerful evocation of London in the blitz – a spy thriller full of guilt, menace and deceit. Informed by his work at the Ministry of Information – and turned into the 1944 Fritz Lang film noir, with Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds.
Crown 8vo (182 x 118mm). [vi],236,[ii]pp. Bound in a smart recent half black morocco, banded and gilt; some spotting of edges and prelims, but otherwise a very good and attractive copy of a difficult wartime Greene.

SOLD

London : William Heinemann, (1951). First edition. Adultery and broken hearts in Clapham – the basis of both the 1955 film with Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson, and the 1999 film with Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes. “For me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language” (William Faulkner, in a letter to his UK publisher).
Crown 8vo (19cm). [vi],(238)pp. Original grey cloth, lettered in gilt; some tanning of outer leaves; a few edge spots; slight flaw to final leaf, but otherwise a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket lightly tanned, but with just minimal wear and a couple of slight nicks, and also very good.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : William Heinemann, (1955). First edition. “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”. Western involvement in Indo-China – twice filmed, with Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave in 1958, and with Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine in 2002 – the book which made Greene a CIA suspect for the remainder of his life. “It is disturbing when the critics hail a novel as masterly with one voice, and then relapse into total disagreement about it ... a problem novel. Already there have been conflicting views on what is supposed to happen, let alone what we should think” (Illustrated London News, 14th January 1956).
Post 8vo (21cm). [viii],(248)pp. Original blue-grey cloth, lettered in gilt; some spotting of edges and endpapers, but otherwise a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket just faintly tanned as usual, with a few spots to flaps and lower panel, and a crease to the back flap, but complete and otherwise also very good, with just one tiny chip.

SOLD

London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), (1959). First edition. Signed by John Hadfield on the front free endpaper. His delightful fiction of a rural arcadia – a retreat to the “more enjoyable depths of an almost mythical East Anglia, where a backwoodsman peer lives in a private railway train, playing vintage jazz as an accompaniment to the amorous dalliance of three gorgeously amoral daughters ... extraordinary moonlight encounters, a drinking scene of classic proportion, a traction engine rally, and a comic cricket match which is the first serious rival to that of Macdonell’s England, Their England”.
Post 8vo (21cm). (292)pp. Original green cloth, ruled, blocked and lettered in gilt and white; light spotting of edges and endpapers, but a very good copy in the original pictorial Philip Gough dust-jacket – the jacket a little worn at extremities, with some light repair and reinforcement, but complete and attractive still.

£150 (reduced from £200)

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1888. First edition. An unusual Haggard, set in his native Norfolk, but one of his best: “A tale of mystery and complications and hidden treasure” (Daily Telegraph) – “combined with the regulation elements of the marriage which is a failure, a bigamy, and a dash of murder ... there is an ex-housemaid and present music-hall singer, suggestively nicknamed ‘The Tiger’, of a type much better left to the police reports” (Graphic); “reaching a far higher level than any of Mr. Haggard’s previous stories” (Liverpool Mercury); “one of the most powerful novels Mr. Haggard has written” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph); “shows that Mr. Rider Haggard has powers of which even he himself is perhaps scarcely conscious” (United Service Gazette).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). [viii],(248); [viii],(264); [viii],(262),[ii]pp. Original red cloth, lettered in black; spines a little sunned and lightly worn; faint traces of small library labels removed from upper covers; some minor bruising and marking; small labels expertly removed from front endpapers, leaving only faint traces; endpapers very slightly cracked in vol. iii; a few minor internal marks and spots; a touch shaken, but a good set in the original cloth, showing very little evidence of library use. Neat blind stamp of Warren’s Library, Winchester, in each volume.

SOLD

London : Chapman & Hall, [1859]. A set of hand-coloured maps of the English counties, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Wight, with general maps of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The maps were originally published serially between January 1830 and July 1832 and are here reissued in lithographic form with the railways, etc., brought right up to date – showing, for example, the Lewes-Uckfield line opened in 1858. The original engraver, Sidney Hall, died in January 1831. A number of plates were already completed, but from September 1831 the remaining counties (from Rutland onwards) are signed not with his characteristic "Sidy. Hall", but with the plainer "S. Hall", the style adopted by his widow Selina, who was quietly and successfully to carry on the business in this quasi-anonymous way until her own death in 1853.
Demy 8vo (21cm). Forty-six folding maps, with four of the maps of larger size, all with original outline hand colour. Original black roan wallet style binding, with ribbon and flap, expertly restored and refurbished; one map loose; a few minor marks, but a very good copy indeed. Chubb DII – not noting this variant.

£350 (reduced from £500)

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London : Boriswood, 1933. First trade edition. The self-taught former ship’s stoker with a powerful novel of a captain obsessed with his only passenger, the wife of a diplomat. A mysterious stoker named Mulcare joins the crew at the last minute. “You are not reading about a ship, you live on it ... I am happy that Mr. Hanley has achieved this first-rate novel. For me he is now easily first among living writers of sea stories” (Richard Aldington).
Demy 8vo (22cm). (424),[viii]pp. Original black cloth, ruled and lettered in red and silver; top edge red; endpapers lightly tanned; edges spotted, but otherwise a very good copy indeed, bright and sound, in the delightful art-deco dust-jacket by James Boswell (1906-1971), also very good indeed, bar a single small mark on the lower panel. Loosely inserted are the original publisher’s flyer and a press-cutting of the Richard Aldington review quoted above.

SOLD

London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882. First edition : one of 1,000 copies of the first issue text, before the corrections made for the virtually identical second impression. One of Hardy’s most original, interesting and controversial novels – a Wessex tale of star-crossed lovers in which he aimed “to make science, not the mere padding of a romance, but the actual vehicle of romance” – “We have known military novels, sporting and dramatic novels, law and police novels, but an astronomical novel never ... The author, in fact, has imagined and described a woman with whom few of his male readers will not fall in love” (contemporary review in The Athenaeum).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (185 x 122mm). [iv],246,[ii]; [iv],240; [iv],(224)pp. Bound, complete with half-titles, in a very attractive later (early twentieth-century) full tan morocco, banded and extra gilt, by Birdsall; original cloth preserved at rear; top edges gilt; marbled endpapers; a couple of faint scuffs; a few internal faint creases and small flaws; endpapers lightly tanned, but a very handsome set.

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1887. First edition : one of just 860 copies in the primary binding. The story of Grace Melbury, the faithful Giles Winterborne, and the faithless Edred Fitzpiers. Controversial for its time, but “his loveliest if not his finest book” (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) and “the most beautiful and most noble of Hardy’s novels” (William Lyon Phelps) – and indeed Hardy’s own favourite – “On taking up ‘The Woodlanders’ and reading it after many years, I like it as a story best of all”.
TThree volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). [iv],302,[ii]; [iv],328; [iv],316pp. Original holly-green cloth, ruled in black and lettered in gilt; a touch dulled; lightly worn at extremities; endpapers strained at hinges (two with neat repair); vol. i. recased and tightened; vols ii and iii a little shaken and slack; a handful of minor flaws, but a rare cloth set.

£950 (reduced from £1,500)

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London : Jonathan Cape, (1941). First British edition. Inspired by Hemingway’s own experience as a war correspondent in Spain and already a best-seller in the United States, incidentally making a rediscovered John Donne briefly an American best-seller too. The film rights were sold for a record sum – and the resulting 1943 technicolour movie with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman was nominated for nine Academy Awards. “There are some unforgettable scenes ... the description by the woman Pilar of the massacre of the mayor, priest and local Fascisti ... the shooting of the civil guard ... For sheer descriptive power ... the blowing up of the bridge would be difficult to equal in fiction. In other words, best-seller or not, this is a magnificent novel” (The Sphere, 15th March 1941).
Post 8vo (198 x 129mm). 462,[ii]pp. Bound in a smart recent half navy morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; a few faint marks but a very good, clean and sound copy in an attractive binding.

£260 (reduced from £400)

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London : William Pickering, 1853. A handsomely produced edition of one of the earliest collected works of the Sweet Singer of the Temple, printed at the Chiswick Press and here in a highly attractive binding by Roger de Coverley & Sons. Originally published in 1835-1836 and including all the extant poems, letters, etc., then known, with lives of Herbert by Izaak Walton and Barnabas Oley, notes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, etc.
Two volumes. Demy 8vo (217 x 139mm). xii,414; (xxviii),384pp. Engraved frontispieces. Title-pages in red and black. Bound in a stylish early twentieth-century full crushed chestnut morocco, banded and gilt; all edges gilt; a few faint marks; endleaves tanned from turn-ins, but overall a very good set indeed.

SOLD

London : John Murray, (2019). First edition : the Waterstone’s “Special Edition”, including an additional short story, “The Last Dead Letter”. Signed by Mick Herron on the title-page. The sixth Slow Horses novel – River Cartwright’s rogue CIA father has been hired to mop up a political scandal in the making, while Louisa Guy is off to Wales in search of Min Harper’s son.
Medium 8vo (25cm). [vi],(376),[ii]pp. Original black boards, lettered in metallic pink; a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket, with the Waterstone’s and Signed by the Author stickers, also very good.

SOLD

London : Methuen & Co., (1904). First edition. Hichens’ celebrated international best-seller of love, faith and sand — a socialite seeks solace in the desert — “Unique in fiction — a soul’s tragedy with which no mortal love or strength can grapple … not merely a fine book, but a book which deserves to live” (London Evening Standard, 20th October 1904). There were two silent film versions even before the award-winning Technicolor version with Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer and Basil Rathbone, made by David O. Selznick in 1936.
Crown 8vo (20cm). (viii),520 + 40pp advertisements dated September 1904. Original red cloth, ruled and lettered in gilt on upper cover and spine; some very minor wear and rubbing to cloth; a touch sunned; a few slight marks and spots, but a very good copy.

£100 (reduced from £200)

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London : by J. Streater, for Henry Twiford, George Sawbridge, Thomas Dring, and John Place, 1657. First edition. One of the earliest printed histories of London, second only to the early editions of Stow in terms of chronology. Compiled by the versatile and engaging Welsh author, royalist, politician and traveller, James Howell, after his release from a lengthy imprisonment at the time of the Interregnum. With accounts of St. Paul’s and the other ancient churches; the individual wards and precincts; the governance of the City; the walls, streets, gates and prisons; the Inns of Court; the twelve great livery companies; the company halls; the Tower, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and other prominent buildings; the Thames; London Bridge; the mayoralty; the city of Westminster and the Abbey; the Strand; Covent Garden; Lincoln’s Inn; Westminster Hall; Parliament, the Admiralty, etc.
Pott folio (270 x 166mm). [x],1-128,301-(408),[viii]pp – collates as institutional copies and complete despite the lacuna in pagination. Engraved portrait frontispiece and a very handsome double-page panoramic view of London from the south, frequently attributed to Wenceslas Hollar and depicting the city on the eve of the Civil War. Bound in a smart recent full calf; red label; repairs to margins of frontispiece and titlepage, not affecting image or text; minor repairs to dedication leaf, with partial loss of a few letters; panoramic view trimmed tight and just within left-hand neatline; text lightly and unevenly browned, with occasional spotting, but a good and serviceable copy, attractively rebound. Ownership inscription (1760) of Isaac Hitchcock – possibly Isaac Hitchcock (1724?-1768) of Bildeston, Suffolk – with occasional annotation of similar date relating to the taking down of the old gates, etc.

£750 (reduced from £1,000)

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London : T. Fisher Unwin, 1887. First edition. An anonymously published landmark in dystopian fiction, with the narrator recovering from unconsciousness into a future William Morris arts-and-crafts ecological world without cities, money or politics – pre-dating Morris’s own “News from Nowhere” by several years, and Wells’s “A Modern Utopia” by even more. Inserted, in its original envelope, is a remarkable single-page signed autograph letter on his North Parade, Penzance, notepaper, dated 31st December 1920, from W. H. Hudson, replying to an enquiry about the scarcity of the book – “I am pleased to learn the first edition is scarce as I would be glad to have it out of existence. The book is a poor thing but in the later editions one or two of the most glaring absurdities are eliminated. The first edition had an ugly black and red cover. I have succeeded in recovering a few copies for the pleasure of destroying them”.
Crown 8vo (20cm). [iv],(288)pp. Original black cloth, lettered in gilt on spine, and ruled, blocked and lettered in red; a little rubbed and worn, with the colour of the cloth touched up in one or two places and some evidence of repair to the lower joint; faint creasing to the cloth of the upper cover; slight cracking to the patterned green endpapers; pencilled notes erased from half-title; a few minor internal marks, but a good copy of a scarce book – with a most extraordinary authorial letter. From the well-known library of the recipient of the letter, the distinguished American collector Paul Lemperly (1858-1939), with his decorative bookplate. Lemperly’s “Among My Books” was published in a limited edition in 1929, containing extensive quotation from Hudson’s letter as well as making it clear that at that point, nine years on, he was still trying to hunt down a copy of the book.

£1,250 (reduced from £2,000)

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London : Faber & Faber, (1963). First edition. His first prose work – eleven Kiplingesque stories on the real manner of the evolution of the owl, whale, fox, polar bear, hyena, tortoise, bee, cat, donkey, hare and elephant.
Foolscap 4to (210 x 151mm). 72pp. Six full-page illustrations by George Adamson (1913-2005). Bound in an attractive designer binding of full blue morocco, with onlays of hand and balloons in white, red and tan; a very good copy housed in its red cloth slipcase.

SOLD

London : Victor Gollancz, 1982. First edition. A presentation copy to the author’s son, inscribed “Angus, with love from the author” (Angus John Mackintosh Stewart, 1936-1998), and dated Fawler (the family home) 1982. A retired Appleby at a fancy dress fête, featuring an unusual number of sheiks, where the entertainment gets rather out of hand.
Post 8vo (21cm). (158)pp. Original red boards, lettered in gilt; just the faintest signs of use but a very good copy in the eye-catching yellow dust-jacket – the jacket also very good.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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London : Victor Gollancz, 1983. First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed and initialled by the author to his son “A. J. M. S.” (Angus John Mackintosh Stewart, 1936-1998), and dated Fawler (the family home) 1983. The two detectives join forces to solve “an intriguing reversal of the classic locked-room mystery” – not how the murderer got in, but how the dead man got out.
Post 8vo (21cm). [iv],(156)pp. Original red boards, lettered in gilt; just a touch bruised, but a very good copy in the distinctive yellow dust-jacket – also very good.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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London : Charles Knight & Co., 1839. First edition. A monumental and attractive treatise on the whole history and practice of wood-engraving, with much on the antiquity of the process, the age of Durer, the revival under Thomas Bewick, the precise techniques and tools employed, etc. Jackson had served part of his apprenticeship under Bewick himself and was one of the finest practitioners of his time. His collaborator, William Andrew Chatto (father of the publisher), also wrote on the history of playing-cards, etc.
Elephant 8vo (161 x 174mm). xvi,(750),[ii]pp. Seven plates, some coloured, including a Baxter print of Ovingham and a double-page “patent illuminated map” of Jerusalem by William Hughes. Numerous wood engravings in text, some coloured. Bound in a smart later (late twentieth-century) half-calf; marbled sides and endpapers; text a little shaken, but firm in binding; a few slight marks, but overall a very good copy. Occasional interesting pencilled annotation from a widely-read and knowledgeable former owner, sadly unidentifiable.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : Tinsley Brothers, 1877. First edition : in the primary binding. “The leading idea in the tale is this: at Birmingham there is an immense property without an owner, and two years ago over 100 claimants from America and other countries held a family council there ... Something similar (under different names of localities etc.) forms the nucleus of my novel which shows how this vast property influences the lives of many people” (Jefferies in a letter of July 1876). His rare third novel, intended to appeal to lovers of the sensational in the style of Wilkie Collins — “He certainly succeeds in seizing on his reader’s attention from the first start, and his story, with all its faults, is never for a moment dull or trivial” (The Graphic, 25th August 1877).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). [iv],(250),[ii]; [iv],278; [iv],(290)pp. Original dove-grey cloth, lettered in gilt, and ruled and blocked in black and gilt; spines a little darkened; a little rubbed; some slight splash-marks and faint spots; two endpapers a little cracked; a little shaken in places; a few minor internal marks and small flaws, but overall a good set of a notable rarity — ranked by Sadleir as the scarcest of all Jefferies’ novels.

SOLD

London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1880. First edition : one of just 1,500 sets printed. Twenty-eight classic essays – “Haymaking”, “The Fine Lady Farmer”, “An Ambitious Squire”, “The Parson’s Wife”, etc., forming “a complete account of all the elements that go to make up the agricultural population of England. We have pictures of every class who live beyond cities ... as accurate as it is artistic ... Nothing so good as ever been written on the subject, nothing in the least approaching to it” (contemporary review in The Examiner).
Two volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). [2],(x),(360); [viii],312,[iv]pp. Original brown cloth, blocked and lettered in black and gilt, and in blind on lower covers (Miller & Matthews B); some minor wear to extremities; a few spots to prelims of vol.i, but overall a very good and sound copy. Small bookseller’s label of Alfred Wilson of 18 Gracechurch Street, London, in each volume.

£150 (reduced from £250)

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London : for C. Dilly, 1798. First edition. “No, Sir; we had talk enough, but no conversation ...” – the essential Johnson distilled (with Boswell’s entire approbation). Johnson on conversation, wine, marriage, children, education, conduct, manners, London, trade, travelling, life, death, religion, politics, and much else.
Demy 8vo (213 x 130mm). [iv],446,[ii]pp. Bound in a smart modern sprinkled calf, richly gilt in period style; marbled endpapers; some spotting, mainly to outer leaves; a few minor marks, but a very good copy.

£300 (reduced from £400)

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London : André Deutsch, (1967). First edition. An extraordinary study – part grim, part comic – of the “beautiful, vulgar, frightening and propitiatory things that people make when confronted by that shocking and unwelcome reminder, the death of another”. With chapters on the corpse; the shroud; the coffin; the hearse; the floral tributes; printing and the word; the procession; the cemetery and the crematorium; the tomb; relics and mementoes, etc.
Crown 4to (26cm). 304pp. Illustrations throughout, including photographs and many Jones drawings. Original purple boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; top edge purple; two corners a little bumped, but otherwise a very good copy in the striking Barbara Jones dust-jacket – the jacket also very good. Bloomfield A7.

SOLD

London : John Murray, 1845. First Owen Jones edition. One of the highlights of early Victorian book production and early colour printing – the text with decorative borders and initials throughout, many in colour, interspersed with divisional titles chromolithographed in gold and glowing colours, and illustrations drawn from the great masters.
Royal 8vo (239 x 153mm). xl,484pp. Eight illuminated titles by Jones, with four less elaborate by Henry Warren and John C. Horsley; vignettes, initials, borders and ornaments by Jones; illustrations by George Scharf after Raphael, etc.; original publisher’s roan over bevelled boards, richly gilt; expertly rebacked and refurbished, retaining the original spine; all edges gilt; some light rubbing, sunning and wear; inner hinges reinforced; some occasional spotting, but still an attractive copy of a handsome book. Small ownership stamp of the old Williams’s Library of Cheltenham.

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Cambridge : Macmillan & Co., 1855. First edition. Kingsley’s ever-popular saga of the days of Drake, the Armada, etc. – “the most perfect romance that we have yet had from Mr. Kingsley’s pen ... he is in love with the manliness, hardihood, and imagination of our forefathers” (Daily News, 4th April 1855). The first novel ever published by Macmillan and probably unique in Victorian fiction in having a holiday resort named after it (much to Kingsley’s annoyance).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (185 x 120mm). [2],viii,(304); vi,356; vi,(374)pp. Bound, with half-titles and preliminary advertisement, but without the inserted catalogue sometimes found, in a near contemporary quarter roan, ruled and lettered in gilt; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; some light wear; faint cracking to vol. iii; internally, some soiling, marking and fraying – especially to vol. i; one leaf with a more extensive repaired tear; occasional pencil marks; a reasonable and modestly priced set of a difficult Victorian classic. Small library stamps of Newtyle Public Library on p.41 of each volume – a Scottish provenance reinforced by some resonant pencil annotation to p.217 in vol iii – the passage relating to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots – “A confounded tissue of lies. Whether true or not – uncharitable”.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London & Cambridge : Macmillan & Co., 1866. First edition. The last novel published by Kingsley, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and friend of Darwin. The final resistance against the Norman conquerors – the “splendid barbarian” and folk-hero Hereward of the Fens, son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia and Lady Godiva – and his witch-wife Torfrida, “whose true witchery lay in her intellect, her courage, and her unswerving love” (The Globe, 30th April 1866). “To lovers of the old class of reading wherein the heroic deeds of our forefathers are graphically described, no better volumes could be read” (Cheltenham Chronicle, 10th July 1866).
Two volumes. Crown 8vo (184 x 123mm). viii,(366); viii,402,[ii]pp. Bound, without the advertisement leaf in vol.i sometimes found, in an elegant later (early twentieth-century) half black morocco; top edges gilt; marbled endleaves; some very minor rubbing and bruising; a few occasional internal marks and spots, but an attractive set. From the notable modern collection of Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016), with his bookplate.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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[London : for J. Knox, 1770]. An attractive double-hemisphere map of the world as known in the west before the discoveries of Captain Cook, with Australia and New Zealand still imperfect and shadowy outlines. Decorated with rococo work in the spandrels and a view of a distant city. Originally engraved by Thomas Kitchin for William Guthrie’s “A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar” (1770).
Copper line engraving on paper. Later hand colour. Engraved surface 185 x 366mm (approx. 7-3/8” x 14-1/2”). Faint old folds, a few slight marks, but overall in very good and clean state. A guaranteed genuine antique map.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : Cassell & Co., (1943). Second impression of the original December 1943 publication – a pleasing presentation copy, inscribed “To Gwen with love from her ageing friend Collie / Christmas 1943” – this his future wife Gwendoline Frances Mary Mitchell (1898-1990), whom he was to marry a few months later. A wide-ranging wartime anthology of uplifting and inspiring quotations on the nature of England and the English, with familiar extracts from Blake, Brooke, Browning, Churchill, Kipling, Masefield, Milton, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Tennyson, Wordsworth, but with a far greater number of lesser-known, more contemporary, and specially commissioned pieces from a variety of voices, including Knox himself and his flatmate, the refugee German actor Olaf Olsen (1919-2000) – “Of a truth, you are a strange, puzzling people. You laugh when you should cry. And when you should cry, you blow your noses very loudly and go for long walks”.
Demy 8vo (22cm). 244pp. Original red cloth, ruled and lettered in black; slightly bruised; a little marked; edges a touch dusty and slightly spotted, but a good copy in a good dust-jacket – the jacket lightly spotted and a little frayed at rear fold, but with only light wear and a couple of short tears.

£75 (reduced from £100)

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London : Faber & Faber, (1984). First British edition. Set mainly in the Prague Spring of 1968 – “A story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities – Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of twentieth-century ‘Being’... This masterly novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence”. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. Filmed in 1988, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, etc.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [vi],314pp. Original black boards, lettered in gilt; a touch of dustiness to edges, but otherwise a very good copy in the Russell Mills dust-jacket – the jacket just lightly used and a touch sunned, but also very good.

£150 (reduced from £200)

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London : for Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1808. First edition. Lamb’s hugely influential rediscovery of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, many of the specimens of their work culled from “plays which are to be found only in the British Museum and in some scarce private libraries” – Francis Beaumont, George Chapman, Thomas Decker, John Fletcher, John Ford, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, George Peele, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and many more – “the most striking anthology perhaps ever made from English literature” (Edmund Blunden).
Crown 8vo (185 x 113mm). xii,484pp. Bound, without half-title, in a very handsome later (early twentieth century) full blue crushed morocco, banded and richly gilt, by Robert Riviere & Son; all edges gilt; inner gilt dentelles; marbled endleaves; some very minor rubbing and a hint of bruising, but a very good copy.

£400 (reduced from £500)

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1902. First edition. “Wild, roaring fun” (Daily News, 20th November 1902). Two well-connected but impoverished young men recruit a team of likewise young, charming and penniless men and women, available for hire to disrupt and disentangle unfortunate or unsuitable romantic attachments before too much harm can be done either to the lovers or, more particularly, their families – “Adventure of the Exemplary Earl”, “Adventure of the Lady Novelist and the Vaccinationist”, “Adventure of the Fair American”, and other tales. “In ‘The Disentanglers’ we have the apotheosis of the detective-story, with, as Mr. Lang’s Canadian millionaire would say, ‘every modern improvement’, divorced, too, from ‘all that cheap revolver business’, to quote the hero and Disentangler-in-Chief ... Apart from the excellent construction and swing of the stories, there is endless fun in the sly digs at literature, modern and ancient – at the penny novelette, the British Museum girl, and the Celtic minor poet” (The Sketch, 3rd December 1902).
Crown 8vo (20cm). [xii],418,[ii]pp. Frontispiece and six perfectly judged plates by Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941). Original decorative cloth – “a bold black and red design on its light coloured cloth cleverly indicative of the contents” (The Gentlewoman, 13th December 1902) – the cloth slightly darkened; a handful of marks and spots; light spotting of edges, but otherwise a very good copy.

SOLD

London : Duckworth & Co., 1913. First edition : Roberts’ variant (1), with the cancel title dated 1913. “Review copies have been noted both with the bound-in title without date and with the tipped-in title with date ... as Duckworth’s records were destroyed during the war, a final solution to these bibliographical problems may be impossible” (Roberts). “No other English novelist of our time has so great a power to translate passion into words, but that is neither the beginning nor end of his art” (London Evening Standard, 30th May 1913).
Crown 8vo (186 x 119mm). (viii),(424) + (20)pp advertisements. Bound in a smart recent half blue morocco, banded and gilt; marbled sides; a few slight marks and spots; one leaf chipped, with the loss of four letters, but a good copy, attractively bound. Roberts A4.

£350 (reduced from £500)

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London : Hodder & Stoughton, (2003). First edition. Signed by Le Carré on the title-page. Regarded by many as the masterpiece to which the author had been building over a lifetime – friendship, loyalty and betrayal from student riots in 1970s Berlin to post-Cold War terrorism. “Few could fail to be thrilled by the unbridled rage ... [he] has once again demonstrated his mastery ... while at the same time giving lesser, ordinary novelists a masterclass in taking nothing for granted” (The Observer).
Medium 8vo (25cm). (384)pp. Original red boards, lettered in black; silk ribbon; a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket unfaded, unworn and very good indeed.

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London : Viking, (2017). First edition : the “exclusive signed edition”, signed by John le Carré on an additional preliminary leaf dated September 2017. Both a prequel and a sequel to “The Spy who Came in from the Cold” – a swansong for George Smiley, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon, Jim Prideaux and other memorable spies of fiction. “Poignant and brilliant” (Robert McCrum in The Guardian).
Medium 8vo (25cm). [2],[vi],264,[ii]pp. Original black boards, blocked and lettered in silver; a fine copy in the dust-jacket.

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London : Robert John Bush, 1877. First edition. More inspired nonsense from Edward Lear – with the present collection containing the first appearance of “The Dong with the Luminous Nose”, “The Pobble Who Has No Toes”, “The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò”, “The Pelican Chorus”, “The Akond of Swat”, etc.
Foolscap 4to (200 x 158mm). [128],4pp. Numerous illustrations by the author, music, etc. Bound in an elegant recent half russet morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; a few slight marks; some internal marks and spots, but a handsomely bound copy of some of the most inspired nonsense in the language.

£350 (reduced from £500)

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London : Geoffrey Bles, (1950). First edition. Illustrations and colour frontispiece by Pauline Baynes. The first and best-known of the Narnia chronicles. “It is a kind of modern fairy tale about four children evacuated to an old house in the country during the war. They discover that merely by stepping into a wardrobe they have access to a wonderland of strange creatures and stranger adventures ... his little book may well become a children’s classic” (a prophetic review in the Belfast News-Letter, 30th October 1950).
Post 8vo (198 x 130mm). (174)pp. Coloured frontispiece. Illustrations. Bound, without final blank, in an elegant recent full green morocco, banded and gilt; a few very minor marks and spots, but a very good copy.

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1876. First edition. A valuable and beautifully illustrated history of coaching – with chapters on most aspects of the history, the coaches and the roads, as well as “some road slang terms”. Illustrated with striking colour-printed plates (finished with hand colour) by Hanhart and woodcuts in the text. As well as Captain Malet’s own work, this edition also collects together for the first time all the “Nimrod” [Charles James Apperley] essays on the subject.
Foolscap 4to (24cm). (xvi),(404)pp. Errata slip. Coloured frontispiece and nine coloured plates. Woodcuts in text. Original pictorial cloth gilt; very lightly worn at spine tips and a little sunned; a few minor internal marks, nicks and slight creases, but a very good copy.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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London : Arthur Gray (Books), [1934]. First edition. “At the end of an evening spent in the West End of London this man found his mind a complete blank as to the events of an hour of it, and he discovered in his possession, inexplicably, a parcel of diamonds that represented a fortune. How, where, and with whom, had he spent the mystery hour?” – Philip Granger is soon mixed up with Doc Summers, bland and ambassadorial king of crime (drawn from the life), but the beautiful Olive is intent on saving him.
Crown 8vo (19cm). (254),[ii]pp. Original orange cloth, lettered in black; small and faint band of discolouration at foot of spine; a few edge-spots; text lightly tanned; a couple of nicks and small flaws, but a good copy of an uncommon title – in the striking original dust-jacket by H. W. Perl (1897-1952) – the jacket a little worn, and lightly creased and sunned, with a few repaired splits and a tear, but complete and attractive still.

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London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First British edition. The title-story and the eight short stories of the “Big Mama’s Funeral” sequence, first published in Colombia and Mexico in 1961-1962. “One of the richest pieces of writing this exceptional author has produced” (Victoria Brittain in the Illustrated London News, 1st October 1971). The second of his books (and the first of his short stories) to appear in a British edition, the translations those of J. S. Bernstein first published in the United States. Márquez was awarded the Nobel in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination”.
Post 8vo (21cm). [vi],170pp. Original black boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; top edge red; a few tiny marks, but a very good copy indeed in the Toni Evora dust-jacket – also very good. Neat ownership inscription of Kiernan Ryan.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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London : Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1846. First edition : the secondary issue, with the eight dramatic engraved plates by James Stephenson (1808-1886) which were not included in the first issue. Familiar Marryat terrain with rip-roaring adventures and derring-do – off Hispaniola, Port Royal, Liverpool, Senegal, sharks, tigers, spies, London, the Tower, Jacobites, Bordeaux, Brazil, diamond mines, etc.
Two volumes. Foolscap 8vo (161 x 98mm). [iv],(380); [iv],(362),[ii]pp. Eight engraved plates. Bound, complete with half-titles and final imprint leaf, in an elegant later (mid twentieth-century) full turquoise morocco, banded and richly gilt, by Riviere & Son; inner gilt dentelles; all edges gilt; marbled endpapers; original pictorial cloth gilt covers preserved at the rear of each volume; spines inevitably a little tanned; short scratch to an upper board; internally a few very minor marks and creases; plates slightly shaved in binding, but a very good copy. No copy of this illustrated issue located in any major UK library.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : for Charles Marsh, 1738. First edition. One of three editions published that year, but with the additional poems not included in the other editions. The poems include three Odes for the Grand Khaibar, replete with references to freemasonry, a poem to Alexander Pope and a poem on the death of Queen Caroline. In other phases of his career the bookseller Marsh also produced versions of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and A Winter’s Tale – improved by himself – as well as the poem, “The Library : An Epistle from a Bookseller, to a Gentleman, his Customer, Desiring him to Discharge his Bill”, of which a contemporary noted that he “did no great matter in his business, being of a very unhappy temper, and withall very proud and insolent, with a very plentiful share of conceit, as appears from this extraordinary piece”.
Foolscap 4to (213 x 136mm). 104pp. Engraved frontispiece by Giles King. Bound in a stylish later (mid twentieth-century) full tree calf, the boards decorated with a Greek key border and masonic symbols; a touch sunned; internally a few leaves roughly opened, but a very good and uncut copy. From the collection of Albert Edward Collins Nice (1898-1969), with his pencilled notes on the previously unrecorded masonic references.

£350 (reduced from £500)

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London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1902. First edition. Mason’s enduring tale of courage, cowardice and redemption – made into popular films on at least seven occasions from 1915 onwards, of which perhaps the most memorable is that directed by Zoltan Korda and starring Ralph Richardson, C. Aubrey Smith, and June Duprez.
Crown 8vo (181 x 117mm). viii,338,[vi]pp. Bound in a handsome recent full walnut crushed morocco, banded and gilt, by Bayntun-Riviere; all edges gilt; marbled endpapers; very occasional mild spotting, but overall a very good copy indeed, most attractively bound.

£750 (reduced from £1,000)

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London : William Heinemann, (1944). First British edition. An American airman traumatised by the Great War searches for meaning in life in Chicago, Paris and India. “Mr Somerset Maugham’s new novel ... is in some ways the most important he has written ... Do not think from all this that the novel is preachy-preachy, because it is not: it is as full of Maugham sparkle and wit, naughtiness, sex and satire as anyone could wish. My own view is that this is the best non-war novel we have had since 1939. I read it several times with deep appreciation and delight” (Aberdeen Evening Express, 20th July 1944). Filmed in 1946 with Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney and Anne Baxter (who won an Oscar), and again in 1984 with Bill Murray, Theresa Russell, Catherine Hicks, Denholm Elliott, etc. Originally published a few months earlier in the USA.
Crown 8vo (182 x 120mm). [iv],284pp. Bound in a handsome recent full blue morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; a couple of tiny marks; a few internal marks and spots, but otherwise a very good copy.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : Golden Cockerel Press, 1947. First edition : limited to 550 numbered copies, of which this is one of 430 on Fabriano's Italian mould-made paper, bound in quarter blue buckram. A presentation copy, inscribed, signed and dated Christmas 1947 to Margery [Green] - "So here it is at last & many thanks". Woman in detail – the feet and legs; the torso; the hands; the neck, face and head, and the hair – illustrated with elegant drawings by Mark Severin (1907-1987). “Patrick Miller may skate on thin ice, but he performs most gracefully. An architect by profession, a globe-trotter by way of relaxation, he has acquired the habit of surveying scientifically every wonder of the world that is set before him. How, then could he hold back when confronted by Woman?” (the publisher, Christopher Sandford).
Royal 8vo (25cm). (64)pp. Five full-page illustrations by Severin. Original quarter blue buckram; paper boards; top edge gilt; a touch sunned; some minor wear to corners; a few marks to boards; final leaf a little tanned, but a good copy. With the decorative bookplate of the recipient, Margery Green.

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1877. A standard edition of the poetry, printed on india paper and published in Macmillan’s “Globe Edition” series. Bound in 1883 in a very handsome binding, with fore-edge painting, for the Cambridge scholar-bookseller Robert Bowes (1835-1919) as a gift for his wife Fanny Bowes (1831-1903) on her birthday in June of that year. Inscribed and initialled by Bowes with his wife’s name and the date — with a further later inscription in a different hand commemorating her death in 1903. With Bowes’ personal “Quod Vis Potes” bookplate bound in. Bowes was a nephew of the publisher Alexander Macmillan (1818-1896) and his partner in the Cambridge bookshop of “Macmillan & Bowes”, while his wife Fanny Bowes was Macmillan’s sister-in-law. Sold together with the companion edition of “Poetical Works of Walter Scott” (1878), bound to match and evidently part of the original gift.
Two volumes. Foolscap 8vo (174 x 115mm). (xii),(626); (xliv),(560)pp. Bound in handsome full citron morocco, banded and extra gilt; all edges gilt; hand-painted endleaves in a design of tulips for Milton and thistles for Scott, the designs repeated in concealment beneath the gilt of the fore-edges and only revealed when the pages are fanned open; spines a little darkened and with some minor rubbing, but otherwise in very good order and an extremely rare example of a personalised binding of this type.

For more on these bindings, see my Bookhunter on Safari blog-post of 5th June 2020.

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London : G. & W. B. Whittaker / Geo. B. Whittaker / Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1824-1832. First edition. A complete first edition set of the five-volume series of her much-loved and most famous work – sharp, affectionate, precise and amused sketches of village life in Regency England – “Our landlord has a stirring wife, a hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village; not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop, and far less elegant, but ten times as fine; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than curl-papers, and more lovers than curls ...”. Walks in the Country, A Country Cricket-Match, A Christmas Party, Christmas Amusements, The Mole-Catcher, Children of the Village, The Cribbage Players, and so much more.
Five volumes. Crown 8vo (180 x 108mm). viii,292; vii[i],(312); viii,315,[i]; viii,345,[i]; iv,362pp. Bound, without half-titles and advertisement leaves, in a smart twentieth-century half tan calf, banded and gilt, for Sotheran; contrasting red and green labels; top edges gilt; a few minor marks and spots; the very occasional crease; mild offsetting in one volume; one leaf with tiny repair, but overall a very good set. With the nautical bookplate of George G. Stevenson in each volume. Sadleir 1752.

£750 (reduced from £1,000)

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1932. First edition. A great success in its day and winner of the Hawthornden Prize. Morgan draws on his Great War experiences for a subtle and ethereal love story – a British officer interned in a castle, a Dutch aristocrat, and his English step-daughter married to a German officer. “The Fountain is written as beautifully as it is possible for a book to be” (John Bayley, in The London Review of Books, 7th February 1985).
Crown 8vo (20cm). (xii),434,[ii]pp. Original blue cloth, lettered across spine in gilt; tiny split at foot of front endpaper, some spotting of edges, but a very good, bright and sound copy in the attractive original dust-jacket – a pictorial design signed VMM – a little tanned and slightly nicked, but also very good.

SOLD

London : Methuen & Co., 1894. First edition. Morrison’s extraordinary vision of the late Victorian mean streets of the East End of London – “Unquestionably an achievement of art ... something more than remarkable. The tune is new in the sense in which the new woman, and the new drama, and the new hedonism, and the other clamant bores of the period are not new ... It is akin to a shock, to a sudden gust of east wind. But to those who care for all humanity ... it should be something like a godsend” (Pall Mall Gazette, 19th November 1894).
Crown 8vo (20cm). (302),[ii] + 32pp advertisements dated October 1894. Original dark green cloth, ruled and lettered in gilt; a few trifling signs of age and use; mild tanning of endpapers; a few slight spots, but a very good copy.

SOLD

Bath : Old School Press, 2001. First edition : one of twenty copies (of 230) reserved in sheets for binders and signed by both Andrew Motion and the illustrator, Simon Brett. Four extended poems from the then Poet Laureate, delicately hand-printed on Magnani paper, illustrated with evocative and atmospheric wood-engravings by Simon Brett.
Post 4to (271 x 190mm). [48]pp. Four wood-engraved illustrations. Bound in black morocco, with delicately shaded pale morocco onlays, in an exquisite designer binding by Kate Holland, winner of the 2006 Mansfield Medal and First Prize for Best Book in the annual Designer Binders’ competition – the present binding dating from the same period; delicately marbled edges and endpapers; the binding housed in its original velvet-lined black cloth box, decorated with a crescent moon. A fine copy of a beautiful book.

£1,500 (reduced from £2,000)

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London : G. Virtue, 1830. A most attractive “gothick” map of the county, decorated with an ornamental border, strapwork title, coats of arms, inset views of Cheltenham, Gloucester and Tewkesbury, swags of fruits and flowers, etc. Engraved in 1830 by James Bingley (1796-1869) for Moule’s part-work series “The English Counties Delineated” (1830-1837) – and here in earliest state, dated 1830 in the plate and before the later addition of railways, etc.
Steel line engraving on paper. Original hand colour. Engraved surface 256 x 205mm (approx. 10” x 8”). Trimmed a little tight (as usual); a few small spots and specks, but overall in very good state. Rare in this early state and with original colour. A guaranteed genuine antique map.

SOLD

[London : George Virtue, 1831]. A highly attractive “gothick” map of the county prepared by the antiquary Thomas Moule. Decorated with an ornamental border, coats of arms, and inset views of Cashiobury and St. Alban’s Abbey. Engraved by William Schmollinger (1811?-1869) and originally produced in 1831 for the part-work series “The English Counties Delineated” (London : 1830-1837) – and here in earliest state (Hodson 94.i) before the addition of railways, etc.
Steel line engraving on paper. Original hand colour. Engraved surface 200 x 261mm (approx. 7-3/4” x 10-1/4”). Trimmed a little tight (as usual); a few faint spots and specks, but overall in very good and clean state. Rare in this earliest state and with original colour. A guaranteed genuine antique map.

SOLD

London : André Deutsch, (1971). First edition. Winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, described by the judges as “a work of great distinction, beautifully written, deeply felt, addressing itself with an often disturbing irony to the problems of uprooting and dislocation in the post-colonial world”. Less a novel than a novella introduced by two short stories — an Indian servant in Washington, D.C., two brothers from the West Indies in London, two English diplomats in East Africa — all within a framing narrative. “Its revolutionary nature still remains untarnished; indeed, the experimental side seems magnified at a time when mainstream deployment of the terms avant-garde and experimental, even form, seems to have fallen into misuse” (Neel Mukherjee in the Paris Review, 20th February 2018).
Demy 8vo (22cm). 256pp. Original black boards, ruled and lettered in gilt; faint spine crease and just a hint of tanning to the front endpaper, but otherwise a very good copy in the silver Sam Houston dust-jacket — the silver with some very faint and inevitable signs of handling, but also very good.

£65 (reduced from £100)

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London : Arthur Gray (Books), [1934]. First edition. “Someone once said that the parties in Hollywood sounded like school treats compared to those given by Maisie Bellamy” – film critic Peter Day knows everyone in the Elstree set – young Lucinda Carey does not. Conflicts between love and career, “the glamour of the film world; written with first-hand knowledge”.
Crown 8vo (19cm). (250),[ii]pp. Original jade cloth, lettered in black; a few minor marks, but a very good copy in the striking art-deco dust-jacket by H. W. Perl (1897-1952) – the jacket a little sunned, label neatly removed, but very lightly used, with just a minor repair at head, but still bright and attractive. Just two copies (British Library and New York) located in the world’s major libraries.

SOLD

London : M. A. Pittman, 1831. First edition. The first book from the pen of “unquestionably the greatest hunting correspondent of all time” (Higginson) – with everything one might wish to know about high-bred racers and hunters – bran mashes, broken wind, capped hocks, Cherry’s elastic pads, clipping, colic, curbs, docking, farcy, firing, founder, frog, megrims, rowels, spavins, splents and so much more – in entertaining anecdote and detailed practice.
Medium 8vo (224 x 138mm). (viii),(504),[ii] + 8pp advertisements dated January 1832. Bound in a lavish later (early twentieth-century) half crimson morocco, banded and gilt with horse and horseshoes, by Root & Son; top edge gilt; ribbon marker; marbled endpapers; binding skilfully touched up in one or two places; occasional minor spotting, but a very handsome copy. Podeschi 138 – not noting the inserted advertisement leaves of the present copy.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) / Jonathan Cape, (1960-1964). A first edition set of her scandalous trilogy – the separately published “The Country Girls” (1960) – Irish girls in black underwear, banned in Ireland, publicly burnt by her parish priest in Tuamgraney – “By turns beautiful and bawdy, funny and haunting ... often referred to as the quintessential tale of Irish girlhood, it is not the novel that broke the mould: it is the one that made it” (Eimear McBride); “The Lonely Girl” (1962) – filmed in 1964 as “The Girl With Green Eyes”, with Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Finch, etc. – and the darker concluding volume set in London, “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964).
Three volumes. Post & crown 8vo (21 & 20cm). (224); (254),[ii]; 190,[ii]pp. Original boards (black, mauve, blue); a few faint marks; some mild spotting to the endpapers of the first volume and edges of the second, but very good copies in the original pictorial dust-jackets by Jillian Willett, Hofbauer and David Fawcett respectively – the jackets with some minor rubbing and a couple of nicks, the back panel of the second a little splashed, but complete and overall also very good. Ownership stamp of the Raffin Stud, Castletown, County Meath, in the second volume.

SOLD

London : Chatto & Windus / Exeter : James G. Commin, 1904. A “new and complete” library edition : limited to 600 numbered sets. “The most curious papers of the sort I ever saw” – the extraordinary treasure trove of the letters and papers of several generations of the Paston family of Norfolk and London, chronicling their lives, tribulations, successes and failures, as they rose from humble beginnings to high society – “They are the richest source there is for every aspect of the lives of gentlemen and gentlewomen of the English middle ages ... The history of the family in the fifteenth century is theirs alone” (ODNB). Although collections of the letters had appeared from 1787 onwards, this edition, with nearly 1,100 letters and papers, edited by James Gairdner (1828-1912) of the Public Record Office, was much the most comprehensive to appear until modern times.
Six volumes. Demy 8vo (218 x 157mm). Bound in a smart mid-twentieth-century half blue crushed morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; spines just a touch darkened, but a very good set – clean and sound. With the nautical bookplate of the notable collector George G. Stevenson in each volume.

£380 (reduced from £500)

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London : David Bogue, 1856 [i.e.1855]. First edition. “There is no living writer in our language who is at all to be compared with Captain Mayne Reid for the power with which he unites fact and marvel” (Morning Advertiser, 7th January 1856) – “As a writer of books for boys, commend us above all men living to Captain Mayne Reid! Wherever his new book goes this new year there will be abundant delight for hours of reading, and plenty to talk about by the evening fire. Toils and adventures, dangers, darings, and sufferings ...” (The Nonconformist, February 1856).
Foolscap 8vo (18cm). viii,(472) + [xvi],32pp illustrated advertisements dated 1856 and February 1856 respectively. Twelve lively plates by Gustave Janet (1829-1898) and others. Original pictorial cloth gilt; a touch rubbed; slight fading and splashing to boards, but still a very good copy. Contemporary (1861) gift inscription to John Edward Oldfield from his Aunt Emma.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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London : Richard Bentley, 1866. First edition. “La Puebla de los Angeles is peculiar, even among the cities of modern Mexico; peculiar in the fact, that two-thirds of its population are composed of priests, pelados, poblanas, pickpockets, and picarones of a bolder type”. Love and bandits in the mountains.
Post 8vo (21cm). [iv],308pp. Frontispiece. Original pictorial cloth gilt; some very minor rubbing and wear; some spotting of prelims, but still overall a very good copy.

£75 (reduced from £125)

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London : Herbert Jenkins, 1925. First edition. An engaging anthology of prose and verse relating to gardens and gardening, culled from wide-ranging and often little-known sources from the reign of Charlemagne to the end of the eighteenth century. With separate sections, inter alia, on castle gardens; the joys of gardening; the gardener; women gardeners; lovesome flowers; sundial mottoes; the orchard; bee lore; astrological lore; gardening calendars, etc. With a bibliography of sources. Compiled by the distinguished gardener and garden designer Sophie Rohde of Reigate. “Will interest the gardener and historian alike, and even the general reader cannot fail to find much that will please him in these enchanting pages” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4th February 1926).
Foolscap 8vo (169 x 105mm). (332)pp. Bound, for Hatchard’s, in an elegant near contemporary half crimson morocco; top edge gilt; a couple of tiny marks; slight tanning of the outer edges of the endleaves, but still a very good copy.

£100 (reduced from £125)

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London : Macmillan London, (1971). First edition. An appealing presentation copy, inscribed “For Arthur with constant / devotion and comradeship / in the art / of history and letters / from A. L.” – the recipient being fellow historian Sir Arthur Bryant (1899-1985). A pioneering study of the social life of Elizabethan England, from court to countryside, with chapters on class, food and sanitation, sex, parish and sport, custom, witchcraft and astrology, etc. The early part of the book in particular has been much marked and underlined by Bryant, with occasional disagreement and some minor annotation.
Demy 8vo (23cm). x,(294)pp. Plates. Portraits. Original blue cloth gilt; top edge blue; a little marked and bruised; internally a considerable amount of staining, mainly to page-edges – Sir Arthur was evidently a messy reader; a well-thumbed copy in a battered and worn dust-jacket – but unique and important in tying together two of the most distinguished English historians of the twentieth century.

£125 (reduced from £250)

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London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First edition in English of “Un Peu de Soleil dans l’Eau Froide”. Troubled Parisian journalist at the point of despair escapes to the country, where he meets a new and extremely respectable married woman. “A sad love story set in Paris and Limoges, told with brevity, compassion and elegance. Sagan misses nothing” (Daily Mirror, 4th November 1971). “It is when love becomes immoderate that tragedy enters”.
Post 8vo (21cm). [vi],184,[ii]pp. Original dark green boards, lettered in gilt; just slightly bruised; a few edge spots, but a very good copy in the Bruce Pinkard dust-jacket — the jacket good with some minor edge-wear, and three short repaired tears and minor creasing on rear panel. A decent copy of a scarce book.

£60 (reduced from £100)

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London : Faber & Gwyer / Faber & Faber, (1928-1936). A first edition set of the three separately published volumes – “This is fiction, but with a difference – for the author, who wishes at present to remain anonymous, has himself lived the life of a hero” – the first two volumes were published anonymously, the first in an edition of just 1,500 copies. “The most satisfying piece of autobiography to be published in our time. All the equipment of a novelist is Sassoon’s. But what novel could equal in fascination this true story? The three books give him a place unique in English letters” (Howard Spring in the Evening Standard, 3rd September 1936).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (183 x 113mm). (396),[iv]; 334,[ii]; 280pp. Bound, without one initial blank leaf, in a handsome recent full navy crushed morocco, banded and gilt; all edges gilt; a couple of tiny marks; mild tanning of outer leaves in one volume, but a very good set.

£1,100 (reduced from £1,500)

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London : Constable & Co., 1925. First edition. Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805), known as Zélide, “lived in her father’s moated castle in Holland, like a fairytale princess in a tower. She was the clever, sexy, mercurial young Dutch blue-stocking with whom Boswell fell disastrously in love in 1764 ... this tender, funny, faintly salacious portrait of a ‘belle-esprit’ is one of the most exquisite biographical miniatures ever written (Richard Holmes)” – a best-seller in its day and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize – “Its success proves that sheer literary quality will make a book go” (James Milne, in the Graphic, 14th November 1925).
Demy 8vo (220 x 144mm). (viii),(216),[iv]pp. Two portrait plates and two silhouettes. Bound in an elegant later red calf, banded and gilt; blue labels; marbled sides and endpapers; top edge gilt; silk ribbon; just a touch dulled; some minute wear to a corner; a handful of spots, but a very good copy. With the small silver book-label of A. Constable Maxwell of the Chateau de Vallamand in Switzerland on the front endpaper.

£85 (reduced from £125)

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London : Charles Knight & Co., [1838-1843]. The first Charles Knight edition. Comprises two volumes each of the comedies, histories and tragedies, as well as the poems, a volume of seventeen doubtful plays sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare (or Shakspere, as Knight insists on having it), together with commendatory verses, a history of critical opinion, material on Shakespeare in Germany, indexes, and a final volume of Knight’s full-length biography. All furnished with introductory notices, notes, variant readings, a glossary, music to the songs, etc. – and profusely illustrated throughout by the leading wood-engravers of the day from the designs of William Harvey (1796-1866) and others. Using the latest technology, Charles Knight (1791-1873) was in the vanguard of bringing the price of books within everyday reach and bringing education and edification in their train with the use of copious illustration – here insisting on illustrations of “the realities upon which the imagination of the poet must have rested ... the localities ... the portraits of the real personages ... accurate costume in all its rich variety”.
Eight volumes. Royal 8vo (240 x 159mm). Pictorial title-pages, profuse vignettes and decorations throughout. Bound in a handsome contemporary full polished plum calf, banded and gilt; silk ribbons; some minor rubbing; a few scratches; a few front endpapers slightly split, but still firm; a handful of minor marks, but a very good, overall very clean and sound set of a tour-de-force of early Victorian publishing. Contemporary bookplates of William Payne to each volume – possibly the nineteenth-century actor William Payne (1804-1878), who carried Edmund Kean from the stage when he fell terminally ill in his last ever performance (Othello at Covent Garden in 1833).

SOLD

London : Constable & Co., 1928. First edition. “You can introduce almost any measure of Socialism or Communism into England provided you call it by some other name. Propose Socialistic confiscation of the incomes of the rich, and the whole country will rise to repel such Russian wickedness. Call it income-tax, supertax, and estate duties, and you can lift enough hundreds of millions from the pockets of our propertied class to turn the Soviet of Federated Russian Republics green with envy”. Begun as a letter to his sister-in-law, Shaw’s mansplaining apologia for socialism eventually ran to eighty-four chapters. He later claimed that although he had taken “the utmost pains to make it intelligible, clear, lucid, unambiguous, simple, and unmistakeable ... only one man in the civilized world has understood it; and that man is Albert Einstein”.
Medium 8vo (25cm). xxxvi,(496)pp. Original decorative green cloth gilt; top edge gilt; mild discolouration of endpapers; edges a little spotted, but otherwise a very good, bright, sound and unworn copy in the striking dust-jacket – an uncredited design by Eric Kennington (1888-1960) – the jacket a touch spotted, and little worn and torn, with some minor repair, but virtually complete and attractive still.

SOLD

London : Editions Poetry London, (1945). First edition. “I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my anticipation to face the moment I most desire”. Smart’s celebrated fictional account of her love affair with the poet George Barker (1913-1991) – “a visceral journey into the human heart, written in a language so urgent, raw and lyrical that each sentence is a bruise or a kiss” (Raffaella Barker).
Demy 8vo (211 x 130mm). 54,[ii]pp. Bound in an elegant recent half red morocco, lettered down spine in gilt; top edge gilt; a most attractive copy of the first edition of this scarce modern classic.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : Henry Colburn, 1826. First edition. A fine historical novel – inheritance, treachery and deceit – opening in Calais in the days of Henry VIII. “Sir Walter Scott must learn to bear a rival near the throne. His contemporaries are already beginning to pay a divided allegiance. They think, and apparently with justice, Horace Smith is second, and only second, to the once sole monarch” (Monthly Magazine).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (187 x 115mm). [ii],310; [ii],350; [ii],326pp. No half-titles called for. Bound, without the errata slip and advertisements sometimes found, in a smart contemporary polished half blue-black calf, ruled and gilt, with ownership initials “N. R.” at foot; red labels; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; just a hint of rubbing, and light wear to corners; light spotting to endpapers and outer leaves; a few very minor internal marks and spots, but a very good set.

£170 (reduced from £250)

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London : W. H. Allen & Co., 1893 [but 1892]. First edition : in the more attractive of the two green variant bindings. “This is a very funny book of adventure which reads like a novel. Two Irishwomen disgusted with London weather, undertook a trip through Connemara” (Cork Constitution, 21st November 1892). With illustrations by W. W. Russell, worked up (not wholly to her approval) from Somerville’s original sketches.
Crown 8vo (20cm). viii,200 + 32pp advertisements dated January 1893. Full page illustrations. Original green cloth, pictorially blocked (to Somerville’s design) on spine and upper cover in blue, ochre and black, and lettered on upper cover and spine in gilt; black endpapers; just a touch of wear; front endpaper strained; a few mild flaws, but overall a very good copy. Contemporary presentation inscription on behalf of the Oxford Gardens Girls’ School Swimming Club to Constance Cave – first prize for “swimming on back” – presumably Constance Cave (1884-1919), daughter of a London jeweller.

£140 (reduced from £200)

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London : Cassell & Co., 1886. First edition : the first issue, with the various errors – “nine o’clock” for “twelve o’clock” in the first line of p.64, etc., without the numerals at the foot of the last page of text, and with the advertisements dated April 1886. David Balfour and a stolen inheritance – the classic adventure story converted into at least ten film and television versions between 1917 and 2005. “I just knew that this was what a story should be like. It was the model that was always in my head” (Hilary Mantel, interviewed in The Guardian, 19th November 2005).
Crown 8vo (20cm). viii,311,[i] + 16pp advertisements. Folding coloured map. Original variant blue cloth; a little bruised, darkened and lightly worn; a few marks; slightly shaken and slack; a few leaves roughly opened and slightly nicked and chipped; a few internal marks and spots, but a reasonable copy.

SOLD

London : Faber & Faber, (2002). First edition : the uncommon hardback issue of Stoppard’s trilogy of plays set in nineteenth-century Russia and London, first directed at the Olivier Theatre by Trevor Nunn in the summer of 2002. “Heroically ambitious and wildly uneven ... it contains passages of breathtaking beauty and surprising ordinariness. But I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds and at its heart it contains a fascinating lesson about the nature of drama ... I think it is time we began to appreciate Stoppard not for his intellectual legerdemain, but for what he is actually best at: exploring the mystery of existence, the anguish of the human heart and the stranger fact that it is our apprehension of death that gives joy and intensity to life” (Michael Billington in The Guardian, 5th and 7th August 2002).
Three volumes. Post 8vo (21cm). [xii],114,[ii]; [xii],106,[x]; [xii],(120),[xii] pp. Original black boards, lettered on spine in pale yellow; a fine set in the original pictorial dust-jackets – also fine.

SOLD

London : J. Johnston, 1820. “Third edition” – i.e. a fresh impression of the original 1820 publication. The naive and pedantic “Doctor Syntax, learned sage, The pride and glory of the age” – with a series of comical adventures and mainly misadventures in London – an anonymous revival of this fictional character first invented by William Combe, but here set against some highly recognisable London scenes. The tale commences with Syntax and his wife Dolly poring over a map of London at the tea-table; arrival at the White Horse in Fetter Lane; robbed in St. Giles; behind the scenes at the opera; at a masquerade; rehearsing his play; in Hyde Park; at the Royal Academy; to Richmond by river; at Vauxhall Gardens; overboard at London Bridge; at the House of Commons; in a gambling den; at St. Paul’s; at the Bank of England; presented at Court to the Prince Regent; and the fate of the play, etc.
Royal 8vo (257 x 160mm). iv,[2],(320)pp. Hand-coloured aquatint frontispiece, pictorial title and eighteen delightful hand-coloured plates, sometimes attributed to Thomas Rowlandson or Robert Cruikshank, although the first is signed by Charles Williams (fl.1797-1830). This copy misbound and lacking the “Doctor Syntax at the Exhibition” plate, but with the “Doctor Syntax at Vauxhall Gardens” plate in duplicate in its stead. Bound in an elegant recent quarter chestnut morocco; a tall copy, the text leaves untrimmed; some internal marks; some occasional browning and spotting, but an attractive example of a highly entertaining production.

£200 (reduced from £250)

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London : Bradbury & Evans, 1848. First edition, bound from the original monthly parts published between January 1847 and July 1848. The parts in first state, with the “rustic” heading to the first chapter, the inadvertent “Mr. Pitt” rather than “Sir Pitt” on p.453, and the notorious “Marquis of Steyne” wood-engraving (p.336) – an illustration said to have been suppressed, under threat of court action, for its allegedly libellous resemblance to the Third Marquis of Hertford. This has been disputed, but the portrait certainly only appears in the earliest copies of the book – and disappeared very early in the book’s life cycle.
Demy 8vo (214 x 131mm). xvi,624pp. Etched plates and highly entertaining text illustrations by Thackeray himself. Bound, without half-title, in a recent half green calf, banded and richly gilt, with burgundy label, in a pleasing imitation of contemporary style; marbled sides; plates spotted in varying degrees, but the text clean; a very good copy in an attractive binding.

£750 (reduced from £1,000)

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London : Bodley Head, (1971). First British edition. Signed by Paul Theroux on the title-page. An early novel from Theroux, set in Malawi, where he had worked for the Peace Corps in 1963-1965, before being thrown out of both the Peace Corps and Malawi for assisting a political opponent of Hastings Banda to escape the country. The novel, published at just about the time Theroux and his family settled in England, was banned in Malawi for many years. “Linguistic exuberance, imaginative daring, a splendid ear for the rhythms of speech, a keen eye for human oddity” (The Scotsman).
Post 8vo (21cm). (318),[ii]pp. Original terracotta boards, ruled and lettered in gilt; just a hint of bruising and a single edge-spot, but a very good copy in the Derrick Greaves dust-jacket — the jacket also very good, with just the merest suggestion of tanning.

£95 (reduced from £150)

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London : David Bogue, 1855. First edition. The final realisation of an idea first hatched in 1828 – an encyclopaedic dictionary of London – from the Adelphi to the Zoological Gardens – mixing the “entertaining and anecdotic” with “social statistics and other Great Facts”. Compiled by John Timbs F.S.A., author, journalist and antiquary. As “agreeable a book as you could wish to meet with. There is so much out-of-the-way reading in it – such apt introduction of personal experience” (The Examiner, 5th May 1855).
Foolscap 8vo (18cm). viii,800 + 32pp advertisements dated July 1857. Portrait frontispiece. Original publisher’s cloth by Leighton, Son & Hodge, with their ticket; lightly sunned; slight spine crease; front free endpaper neatly excised, but overall a very good copy. Small contemporary booksellers’ label of Mann Nephews of Cornhill.

£85 (reduced from £125)

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., (1944). First British edition. “The history of a people with the politics left out” – Trevelyan’s magisterial survey of English life over six centuries – “a series of successive scenes ... for in Chaucer’s time the English people first appear as a racial and cultural unit ... ... unless we become a totalitarian state and forget all our Englishry, there will always be something mediaeval in our ways of thinking, especially in our idea that people and corporations have rights and liberties which the State ought in some measure to respect, in spite of the legal omnicompetence of Parliament”.
Demy 8vo (214 x 134mm). xii,628pp. Maps, some double-page, two coloured; diagram. Bound in an elegant, slightly later, half navy crushed morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; marbled endpapers; a very good copy. Small Times Book Club stamp in two places.

£100 (reduced from £125)

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London : Bodley Head, (1975). First edition. “Good short stories are hard to come by, but when William Trevor produces a new collection one can be sure that they are more than merely good ... the twelve stories ... are as various and surprising as ever, but never for a moment do they stray from the world we know, or the world that we know exists”. Includes the title story, as well as “Afternoon Dancing”, “Mrs Silly”, “Office Romances”, etc.
Post 8vo (21cm). (254),[ii]pp. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt; faint spine crease; a few faint spots, but overall a very good copy in the original John Walsh dust-jacket – also very good, fresh and unworn.

£75 (reduced from £100)

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London : Richard Bentley, 1858 [i.e. 1857]. First edition. “The best of the new novels. The author has left Barchester Cloisters and now finds his way into the civil service, upon which he has ideas as strong as those he has expressed about ecclesiastical endowments ... unusually good, and the character-painting ... excellent” (The Examiner, 19th December 1857). Trollope regarded it as “certainly the best novel I had as yet written” – notable also for what he regarded as his first successful love scene and the first appearance of Chaffanbrass.
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (181 x 111mm). iv,340; iv,322; iv,334pp. Bound in a neat, early twentieth-century, half blue calf, banded and gilt; marbled endpapers; sprinkled edges; some very minor rubbing and bruising; internally a little thumbed, with small marks, some creases, and very occasional annotation and underlining, but a good set of a scarce early title, most of the original 1,000 copies being intended for library lending.

£500 (reduced from £750)

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London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1867. First edition. Grace Crawley, Mrs Proudie, Septimus Harding, etc. – “Mr. Trollope has seldom been in greater force” (Illustrated London News, 9th March 1867). “Taking it as a whole, I regard this as the best novel I have written” (Trollope in 1883). With lively wood-engraved plates and illustrations after George Housman Thomas (1824-1868), mainly engraved by his brother, William Luson Thomas (1830-1900).
Two volumes. Demy 8vo (209 x 129mm). [iv],384; [iv],384pp. Thirty-two full-page plates and thirty-two vignettes. Bound in a stylish recent full burgundy crushed morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; mild browning and spotting to outer leaves; a few faint marks; one plate trimmed tight, but overall a very good and handsome set, housed in a custom-made cloth case.

£360 (reduced from £500)

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1873. First British edition. One of Trollope’s best and most enjoyable – and “one of the most entertaining, worthless, attractive women in the history of the novel: the totally amoral Lizzie Eustace” (P. D. James). “The novel is rare in fine state, for it had great library popularity ... few copies in good original condition have survived the zeal of contemporary readers” (Sadleir, writing in 1928).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (183 x 123mm). viii,354; viii,(364); viii,(354)pp. Bound (for Hatchard’s of Piccadilly), complete with half-titles, in a smart later (early twentieth-century) half red morocco; top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; silk ribbons; a few very minor internal marks, spots and small flaws, but overall a very good set in a handsome binding. Monogram bookplates – possibly of George Capel Cure (1853-1943) of Blake Hall, Ongar – engraved by Allan Wyon (1843-1907), together with the more recent bookplate of the notable modern collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016).

£960 (reduced from £1,250)

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1879. First edition. A scarce late Trollope, featuring on Sadleir’s “A”-list of rarities (XIX Century Fiction, 1951). Disinherited son makes good in the goldfields of Australia, returning home a wealthy man to marry Hester Bolton, but the delightfully wicked Euphemia Smith turns up to claim a prior marriage. Trollope makes interesting use of his Post Office experience to hinge the story on a forged postmark. “Mr Trollope has perhaps never hit upon a story that more strongly arouses the reader’s attention and sympathy, and never told one with more mastery of the whole situation, in small things no less than in great” (The Graphic, 26th July 1879).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (181 x 120mm). vi,290; vi,296; vi,302,[ii]pp. Bound, complete with half-titles and final blank, in a most handsome later half morocco, gilt on wide bands and decorated with small onlay flowers, by Zaehnsdorf; all edges gilt; marbled sides and matching endpapers; just a hint of rubbing; a few minor internal marks, but overall clean and sound, and a very good set indeed. With the attractive bookplates of both Ernest George Mocatta (1849-1927), stockbroker and book-collector, and Harold Charles (Harley) Drayton (1901-1966), the renowned financier whose library was dispersed at Sotheby’s in 1968. Sadleir 55 – “very scarce in fine condition”.

SOLD

London : Chapman & Hall, 1880. First edition. A fine and unduly neglected late novel, the last of the Palliser sequence and Trollope at his most moving and humane. “We come across many old friends of bygone days – the Duke of Omnium, Mr. and Mrs. Finn and many, many others ... we roam around Barsetshire ... The book is written in Mr. Trollope’s happiest style, and is one which, when once taken up, it will be found impossible to put down” (The Graphic, 29th May 1880).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). viii,320pp; viii;(328); viii,312 + 24pp publishers’ catalogue. Original blue-green cloth, blocked in black and lettered in gilt; expertly recased and refurbished; endpapers rejointed; edges cleaned; some minor residual signs of age and wear; a few minor marks, but otherwise a very good and attractive set. With the bookplate of Leslie Benson in each volume and the earlier ownership inscription ‘Bradwell’ to each title-page.

£360 (reduced from £500)

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London : Richard Bentley, 1837. First edition. A novel with the reputation of being her best – a stinging satire on evangelicalism, with an unscrupulous vicar who manipulates the more susceptible women of the parish – “We do not know that we have ever read a work of fiction, similar in general character, superior to ‘The Vicar of Wrexhill’. Never, certainly, have we met with a more able, a more ingeniously conducted exposure of canting hypocrisy” (The Scotsman).
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (195 x 114mm). [iv],324; [iv],328; [iv],(344)pp. Frontispieces and six striking further plates drawn and etched by Auguste Hervieu (1795-1880). Bound, with both half-titles called for, in a nineteenth-century half roan with marbled sides and the binder’s labels of Fr. Ljunggrens of Goteborg – now fully rebacked in a recent chestnut morocco, banded and gilt, with black labels; some occasional spotting and browning; a few minor marks, nicks, creases and small flaws, but overall a very good set of an uncommon book.

£280 (reduced from £500)

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London : Oxford University Press, 1933. First edition. A distinguished, literate and well-illustrated survey of all aspects of eighteenth-century life, with authoritative essays by G. M. Trevelyan, Dorothy George, G. D. H. Cole, R. W. Chapman and others – the period; the church; the navy; army; exploration and discovery; travel and communications; London; town-life in the provinces; industry and trade; agriculture and rural life; poverty, crime and philanthropy; manners, meals and domestic pastimes; sports and games; costume; taste; painting and engraving; sculpture; architecture and the garden; interiors; drama and theatre; music; education; science; medicine; the law and lawyers; authors and booksellers; newspapers, etc.
Two volumes. Medium 8vo (24cm). (xxiv),(406),[ii]; (x),404pp. Numerous plates. Original cloth gilt; a very good and bright set in the dust-jackets – price-clipped but with only minimal wear.

£75 (reduced from £100)

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London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1870. Forty-fourth edition. A quite extraordinary compilation for the nineteenth-century child, condensing into under 500 pages an encyclopaedic amount of information on all manner of topics. Conceived in the form of Socratic question-and-answer dialogue, we learn of everything from acorns to zinc – from just one opening at random, “What is goulard?”, “What is benzoin?”, “What is storax”, “What is gum-guaiacum”, “What forms the famous diamond cement?” – all confidently and succinctly answered. Originally published as “262 Questions and Answers” in 1825, the book rapidly became a standard text, much expanded through multiple editions until at least a sixty-third edition in 1913, the text initially augmented after the author’s death by her nephew Robert Arthur Ward (1826-1898).
Foolscap 12mo (139 x 88mm). (vi),474pp. Bound in a smart recent full tan calf, banded and tooled in blind; red label; marbled endpapers; a few faint signs of age and use, but a very good copy. Very occasional annotation and a number of pencil marks.

£75 (reduced from £100)

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London : for G. B. Whittaker / Bath : John Upham / Exeter : Charles Upham, 1824. First edition. “One of the most intellectual and imaginative productions of the age” (Monthly Critical Gazette, 1st December 1824). Bookseller, orientalist and quondam mayor of Exeter, Upham intended his anonymous tale to introduce readers to the full glories of ancient Egypt – “a series of data, whereby may be formed a knowledge and appreciation of this ancient and illustrious kingdom, resorted to by the wisest and best of the philosophers, the sages, and legislators of Greece, and pronounced by them to be ‘the mother of arts, and the fountain of wisdom’”.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (187 x 111mm). viii,(342); [ii],(322); [ii],328pp. Bound, without half-titles and a final blank, in an attractive near contemporary half blue-green polished calf, worked in blind on broad bands, ruled and lettered in gilt; red labels; marbled sides; some mild rubbing and a few minor signs of age and use, but a very good, crisp and sound set. Bookplate with the unicorn crest of the Marquesses of Conyngham in each volume and the contemporary ownership inscription of A. Conyngham in vol.i - presumably the diplomat Albert Denison Conyngham (1805-1860), later first Baron Londesborough. Wolff 6925 - not in Sadleir.

£250 (reduced from £400)

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Basle [i.e. London : by W. Bowyer], 1734. First edition. Although an English translation had been published in London as “Letters Concerning the English Nation” in 1733, this is the first appearance of the original French text of the book now generally known as the “Lettres Philosophiques” and as “the first bomb thrown at the Ancien Régime”. It has been said of Voltaire that “he came to England a poet and left it a philosopher”: however that may be, this book resulting from his stay in 1726-1728 is “one of the greatest and most influential works of the eighteenth century and beyond ... the book that taught the whole of Europe how to think” (Voltaire Foundation). The letters, contrasting English and French thinking, deal variously with religion in England – Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Socinians; politics, parliament and Magna Carta; trade, commerce and the businessman who “contributes to the felicity of the world”; English empiricism and Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton; and literature – Shakespeare above all, Wycherley, Congreve, Swift and Pope, etc. The London publishers’ preface is interesting on the author’s extreme reluctance to sanction a French-language edition – they had suppressed this edition for an entire year, but others were now preparing illicit editions and they now had to displease the author to please the public. The furore which greeted the French editions when they appeared in France probably justified Voltaire’s reluctance and the use here of a fake Basle imprint.
Foolscap 8vo (171 x 103mm). [viii],228,[xx]pp. Bound in a creditable modern rendition of early eighteenth-century full panelled calf; sprinkled edges; a few slight marks; Voltaire’s name added to the title-page in manuscript; faint fringe of very pale discolouration to fore-edge throughout text, barely visible in most places; a few minor internal marks and tiny flaws, but a good copy of one of the key books of the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century (1768) ownership inscription now obscured.

£850 (reduced from £1,250)

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London : Effingham Wilson, 1831. First edition under this title of “The Reformers’ Bible”, Wade’s “accessible critique of elite parasitism” (ODNB). A publisher’s presentation copy, inscribed on the title-page, “To the Editor of the Weekly Dispatch. With the Publisher’s Compliments”. Based on Wade’s earlier “The Black Book; or, Corruption Unmasked” (1820), but here “composed entirely afresh, newly arranged ... in all respects a new book”, and published by Effingham Wilson (1785-1868), radical bookseller of the Royal Exchange. The editor of the Weekly Dispatch, presumably Robert Bell, recipient of this copy, was quick to review it: “a complete view of the expenditure, patronage, influence, and abuses of the government, in church, state, law and representation”, warning the sinecurists, “who have too long been permitted to fatten in luxurious and useless idleness on the industry of this tax-eaten nation, this is a most dangerous publication. In the present age, we hold it to be an incontrovertible maxim, that a perfect knowledge on the part of the people of the existing abuses in Church and State, is all that is required for their abolition” (Weekly Dispatch, 6th February 1831). The passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832 was not coincidental.
Demy 8vo (213 x 132mm). xx,576pp. Caricature frontispiece. Bound in contemporary half tan calf, banded and gilt; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; spine expertly repaired at head and joints; light offsetting and spotting to opening leaves, but otherwise a very good copy. With the contemporary small bookseller’s label of Richard James Kennett (1802-1885) of Great Queen Street on front pastedown.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : Edward Wallis, [ca.1820]. An extremely uncommon jigsaw map of the world, produced for educational purposes – the world in hemispheres, with six ancillary maps showing circles, zones, parallels, meridians, definitions, etc. First produced by Wallis’s father, John Wallis (1745?-1818) in 1800, but here with some revision – Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) now shown as a separate island, additional island groups in the Pacific, etc.
Copper line engraving on paper, with original hand colour. 257 x 445mm (approx. 10-1/8” x 17-1/2”). Dissected into about fifty pieces and mounted on wood; a few minor marks and specks, but complete and overall in very good condition. Just one copy (an incomplete example in the Library of Congress) of the 1800 edition located in major libraries worldwide, and none at all of this revised version.

£750 (reduced from £1,000)

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London : George G. Harrap & Co., (1931). First Rackham edition. The great classic of angling literature, here delightfully illustrated by Arthur Rackham. “A very attractive volume which (unlike some ‘gift books’) can be read with pleasure as well as looked at” (Yorkshire Post, 2nd December 1931).
Crown 4to (240 x 177mm). (224)pp. Twelve tissue-guarded colour plates. Illustrations in text. Bound in a fine slightly later (mid twentieth-century) half green crushed morocco by Frost & Co. of Bath, banded and gilt with a variety of angling motifs in compartments; top edge gilt; marbled endpapers; a few slight spots; frontispiece tissue slightly creased, but overall a handsome copy.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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Edinburgh & London : William Blackwood & Sons, 1841. First British edition. A celebrated novel from the Welsh barrister and M.P. – shop assistant inherits a fortune and must navigate the ways of the wealthy, devious lawyers, social climbers, and miscellaneous opportunists. The legal battles have led to it being described as “the most famous novel about the law” (Robert Lee Wolff).
Three volumes. Post 8vo (192 x 116mm). viii,(404); [iv],(392); [ii],(430)pp. Bound, without two half-titles and an advertisement leaf, in a pleasant contemporary half red calf, banded and gilt; marbled sides and edges; some minor rubbing, mild scuffing and light wear; some spotting to binder’s blanks; a few faint signs of age and use, but otherwise a very good set. With the ownership inscriptions of R. D. Nicholls – possibly Robert Devereux Nicholls (1811-1848) – and the later bookplate of the well-known collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016) in the first volume.

£180 (reduced from £250)

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London : J. & C. Brown & Co., (1856). First edition : with the variant undated title-page. “I returned to Scotland Yard to report …” – the very first appearance in fiction of a Scotland Yard detective – indeed, the first English detective stories. “Waters” of the Yard was the invention of journalist William Russell – the stories originally published in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1852, with some of the stories appearing in book form in New York in 1852. The present publication is the first appearance of all eleven, with a final twelfth tale not previously published.
Foolscap 8vo (18cm). (310)pp. Wood-engraved frontispiece, engraved by George Measom (1818-1901), later knighted for his charitable work. Original pictorial boards, a dramatic yellowback design in red and black; rebacked with a neat paper spine replacing the fragile lost original; some rubbing and wear; internally a few small marks, spots and slight creases, but overall an attractive copy of a literary milestone.

£600 (reduced from £850)

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London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1968). First British edition. “Watson, 40, is American. He was a gangling, crew-cut, Anglophile student of twenty-two when he went to Cambridge and met Dr. Francis Crick. Two years later they had solved the problem of DNA ... But the discovery was not made by supermen. In London yesterday Watson, whose book reveals the failings, foibles and petty jealousies of many scientists still well known in Britain, spoke of the bumbling way in which the discovery was made” (Daily Mirror, 16th May 1968).
Demy 8vo (23cm). xvi,(236),[iv]pp. Illustrations. Portraits. Diagrams. Facsimiles. Original purple boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; top edge lilac; a very good, clean and sound copy in the Dorothy Judd dust-jacket – the jacket price-clipped, and with some minor wear to extremities, but also very good.

SOLD

London : Duckworth, 1930. First edition. Waugh on his travels – Monte Carlo, Naples, Messina, Haifa, Port Said, Cairo, Malta, Crete, Constantinople, Athens, Corfu, Venice, Ragusa, Barcelona, Algiers, Malaga, Gibraltar, Seville and Lisbon – “piquant and entertaining, and, of course, pleasantly outspoken ... a jolly book, then, in which Mr. Waugh manages to advertise quite a number of picturesque objects, including himself. I enjoyed every word of his book, and have no hesitation in recommending it” (Ralph Straus in The Bystander, 1st October 1930).
Demy 8vo (23cm). 206,[ii]pp. Frontispiece by the author; double-page map; sketch map and three photo plates of Barcelona. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt; a little sunned and faded; endpapers tanned; some spotting, mainly of edges and prelims; a good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket expertly repaired and restored in places.

SOLD

London : Chapman & Hall, (1936). First edition. A collection of eleven short stories, including “Period Piece”, “Excursion in Reality”, “Love in the Slump”, “Bella Fleace Gave a Party”, etc. “One of the few living authors who is incapable of being a bore. One of the few whose books are worth buying and keeping ... Mr. Waugh is the much-imitated author of our time. Yet we all know that he is inimitable” (Daily Mirror, 30th June 1936).
Crown 8vo (20cm). [ii],(238),[ii]pp. Frontispiece in two colours by Thomas Derrick (1885-1954) – a design also used on the elusive dust-jacket. Original lizard pattern red and black cloth, lettered in gilt; faint mark to top edge; some mild spotting of edges, but a very good copy, still bright and unworn.

£280 (reduced from £400)

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1945. First edition. “Chapter One : I meet Sebastian Flyte – and Anthony Blanche – I visit Brideshead for the first time” – “Each of his novels has hit its intended mark. He has not, up to now, aspired to write a great book. This time he has; and he has done so” (Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler, 13th June 1945).
Crown 8vo (187 x 122mm). 304pp. Bound in an elegant recent crimson quarter morocco, banded and gilt; a few faint edge-spots; a couple of minor internal marks, but otherwise very good copy, handsomely bound.

SOLD

London : Chapman & Hall, 1952-1961. A first edition set of the separately published “Men at Arms” (1952), “Officers and Gentlemen” (1955) and “Unconditional Surrender” (1961). “One doesn’t read Evelyn Waugh for military history. But ... a brilliant reconstruction ... the characters and episodes sketched with the sure dexterity of a model by Barbara Hepworth, the lightness of wit sustained marvellously, the judgments suitably heavy” (Birmingham Daily Post, 5th December 1961). “Waugh’s most profound and substantial work” (Anthony Gardner).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (186 x 121mm). (vi),314; [x],(336); [viii],(312)pp. Bound in an elegant recent quarter blue morocco, banded and gilt; top edges blue; some spotting of edges and mild tanning to outer leaves in the final volume, but otherwise a very good set.

£500 (reduced from £750)

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1904. First edition. A publisher’s presentation copy, with a presentation stamp on the title-page, and a review slip loosely inserted. Wells in full satirical mode as research chemists in Kent create a substance causing colossal growth – of chickens, plants, wasps, rats – and humans. “The Food of the Gods is, though it is hardly necessary to say so, a strange book. There is more in it than in half-a-dozen ordinary novels put together” (King and His Navy & Army Magazine, 15th October 1904).
Crown 8vo (20cm). (viii),318,[ii] + 16pp advertisements dated July 1904. Original sage-green cloth, lettered in gilt and decorated in blind on front cover; top edge gilt; some very minor rubbing and bruising; some spotting, mainly of edges and endpapers; just a touch shaken, but still overall a very good copy.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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London : Macmillan London, (1983). First edition. Signed by the author (as Mary Wesley) on the title-page. Her scarce and startling first novel for an adult audience – “Leaving her cottage in immaculate order (so that others would not be troubled) Matilda Poliport sets off for the seaside. She is armed with a bottle of Beaujolais and a gourmet’s picnic for a meticulously planned suicide” (Liverpool Echo, 28th May 1983).
Post 8vo (21cm). [iv],(218),[ii]pp. Original blue boards, lettered in silver; text a little tanned as always, but otherwise a very good, bright and sound copy in the original dust-jacket – incorporating an L. S. Lowry picture – fresh, clean and unworn.

£150 (reduced from £250)

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London : John Murray, 1891. First edition. A monumental dictionary of London from the well-known Abbey Road, and Abbey Street, Bermondsey, to the Yorkshire Stingo and the Zoo. “There is scarcely an unregarded, shabby-genteel street in Bloomsbury, or Chelsea, or Clerkenwell which has not its shred of history or literature connected with it” (London Evening Standard, 5th February 1891). Ostensibly based on Peter Cunningham’s “Handbook of London” (1849), but so far extended and updated as to be essentially a new work.
Three volumes. Medium 8vo (230 x 144mm). xxxii,(546); [iv],622; [iv],(608)pp. Bound in a handsome near contemporary half aubergine crushed morocco, banded and gilt, by Bickers & Son of Leicester Square; all edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; a few slight marks; some shelf-wear to lower edges; some foxing and spotting, mainly to endpapers, edges and prelims, but otherwise a very good set in a most elegant binding. Contemporary ownership inscriptions.

£220 (reduced from £300)

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London : Herbert Jenkins, (1940). First edition. A Drones Club collection of nine short stories – four Bingo Littles, two Mulliners, and three Ukridges. “Reading these happy efforts one forgets for a while the realities of war. And, after revelling in the inspired idiocies of Bingo Little, Freddie Fitch-Fitch, and that superman Stanley Featherstone Ukridge, one returns to the fray with redoubled energy. There is even the temptation to issue a new urge – ‘Read Wodehouse – it’s a national duty’“ (Dundee Courier, 2nd July 1940).
Crown 8vo (19cm). 284,[iv]pp. Original orange cloth, blocked and lettered in black; a couple of tiny marks; endpapers a little tanned, but a very good copy in the original dust-jacket – a lively design by Ian Fenwick (1909-1944) – the jacket with some minor repair and reinforcement at head and tail, but complete and still very attractive. With the bookplate of Swedish collector Anders Ollfors (1938-2017).

SOLD

London : James Wyld, 1891. An attractive circular map of the environs of London on a scale of half an inch to a mile, extending north beyond Hertford and Ware, east to Tilbury, south to Dorking and Edenbridge, and westwards to Windsor and Eton. Coloured circles indicate places respectively within four miles and twelve miles of Charing Cross. Originally published in 1832 and revised and updated by Wyld’s son and grandson until the present version, which is the last known.
Lithograph on paper with delicate original hand colour. Printed surface 620 x 610mm (approx. 24-3/8” x 24”). Dissected, mounted on linen, and folding into a Wyld cloth case, with paper labels (cover title “Wyld’s New Map of Country Round London”); case a little worn and spine label chipped; pinholes to upper margin of map; a few slight creases, but the map overall in very good state. Ownership stamp of James Scott in two places, with some pencilled addition to the map beyond the south-west corner. Hyde D&H 344 – not listing this edition.

£260 (reduced from £400)

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London : Michael Joseph, (1951). First edition. “The hero’s first whiff of disaster on the fatal morning is that it sounds like Sunday. And yet it can’t be Sunday ... Civilization’s ‘tightrope walk’ is at an end; the whole world has been struck with blindness” (Illustrated London News, 6th October 1951). An instant success – a large second printing ordered within days – filmed in 1963, with Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Janette Scott, etc. , and twice adapted into television series.
Crown 8vo (185 x 119mm). 302pp. Bound in a smart recent half green morocco; raised bands; top edge gilt; original cloth spine preserved at rear; a handful of faint and tiny spots, but overall a very good, clean and sound copy.

£500 (reduced from £750)

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1879. First edition. A physician dies leaving his widow with a medical discovery to be passed on to whichever of his sons is best equipped to perfect it and most apt to benefit the world with it. “The chief interest of the novel, however, is due to Miss Yonge’s never-failing genius for working up minute and photographic details, stroke by stroke, until we know her characters so well that it will be strange if we ever forget them” (The Globe, 30th January 1880).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). iv,314; iv,(315)-636; iv,(637)-956pp. Original green decorative cloth gilt; some mild rubbing and slight bruising; some spotting of edges and prelims; a few slight creases, but overall a very good set. Not listed in Sadleir or Wolff.

£125 (reduced from £200)

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