ASH RARE BOOKS – ANTIQUARIAN RARE AND FINE BOOKS – FIRST EDITIONS – ANTIQUE MAPS AND PRINTS
![]() | ASH RARE BOOKS
|
THE 1971 CATALOGUE | |
CLICK ON REFRESH/RELOAD TO ENSURE YOU HAVE THE UPDATED VERSION OF THIS PAGE | |
![]() |
ALDISS, Brian (Brian Wilson), 1925-2017 : A SOLDIER ERECT : OR FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE HAND-REARED BOY. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First edition. Signed and dated (1991) by Brian Aldiss on the title-page. The second Horatio Stubbs novel — the unforgettable Forgotten Army in India and Burma — a wildly funny but wholly serious attempt by Aldiss “to recreate it exactly as it was, whether heroic, bawdy or downright bloody unspeakable”. The book's publication in January 1971 led to a newspaper spat between the bookseller turned author and Mark Kahn, reviewer for the “Sunday Mirror” — “Chuck It, Mr Aldiss”, began the review — “I’m sorry that Mr Kahn (last Sunday) found my new novel ... tedious and nasty. War often is tedious and nasty”, came the lofty response, but it is noticeable that only one further Horatio Stubbs novel appeared, not the four that Aldiss originally intended. £75 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44965 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
AMIS, Kingsley (Sir Kingsley William), 1922-1995 : GIRL, 20. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). We know from the opening section, “Imperialist Racist Fascist”, that champagne socialists might be in for a skewering. Amis in fine satiric form — the tale of Sir Roy Vandervane, eminent conductor with a taste for ever younger women, and his wife Kitty, with “all her command of oral italics, ditto inverted commas, black-letter and illuminated capitals”. Amis captures all the modish fashions of the day — attitudes, pronunciations and prejudices (including his own), as well as clothes, furnishings, music, etc., with merciless accuracy. SOLD |
![]() |
AUDEN, W.H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907-1973 : ACADEMIC GRAFFITI. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. Sixty-one playful clerihews from Auden, each illustrated with an entertaining caricature portrait from Filippo Sanjust (1925-1992) — “Mallarmé / Had too much to say / He could never quite / Leave the paper white”, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
AXELROD, George, 1922-2003 : WHERE AM I NOW — WHEN I NEED ME? London : André Deutsch, (1971). First British edition. “All you need to know about Hollywood, sex, drinking, adultery, desperation, marriage and money” — a novel from screenwriter, producer and director George Axelrod, living in London in 1971, and already famous for “The Seven Year Itch”, as well as his adaptations of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “The Manchurian Candidate”, “The Secret Life of an American Wife”, etc. The tale of writing coach Harvey Bernstein, “failed poet, failed novelist, failed family man, failed drunk, failed suicide”, who divides fiction into those useful categories of “thin sensitive novels” and “thick insensitive novels”. A bawdy romp with one of his students, with a certain amount of guying of Philip Roth. SOLD |
![]() |
BALLARD, J.G. (James Graham), 1930-2009 : CHRONOPOLIS AND OTHER STORIES. New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, (1971). First edition. A collection of sixteen of the very best of Ballard’s early science fiction short stories, his own favourites, originally published in magazines between 1957 and 1966. Includes the title-story itself — a world where watches and clocks are banned; “Billenium” and “Build-Up” — worlds of over-population; the seminal “Terminal Beach”, etc. “No writer has ever written better in this genre; few have equaled these stories. This is a collection to savor and reread” (publisher’s blurb). There was no equivalent British edition. SOLD |
![]() |
BANNOCK, Graham, 1932- : THE JUGGERNAUTS : THE AGE OF THE BIG CORPORATION. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First edition. “This book is a warning about the coming domination of all western economies by the super-corporations — the Juggernauts of the new industrial order ... It argues that the size of the largest corporations has long since passed the point at which they can be managed effectively except at the expense of the consumer and the employee ... sterile conformism ... There is an urgent need to evolve a new public policy ... the alternative will be ... a new Dark Ages in the shadow of the giant corporations”. We can’t say we weren’t warned. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44960 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
BANVILLE, John (William John), 1945- : NIGHTSPAWN. London : Secker & Warburg, (1971). First edition. Signed by multiple award-winning John Banville on the title-page — loosely inserted is a 2008 ticket for “An Evening with John Banville”, the occasion on when the book was signed. Night Spawn, Night’s Pawn, Knight’s Pawn — his sometimes disavowed first novel, a fantasy political thriller of sorts set on a Greek island and then in Athens — “crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious”, in his own words, but for at least one online commentator, “I am left stunned. I think I have been bludgeoned by beauty”. £500 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44931 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
BARKER, George (George Granville), 1913-1991 : POEMS OF PLACES AND PEOPLE. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. Twenty-two poems and the poem sequence “Venusberg”, dedicated to Graham Greene — the poems mainly in remembrance of people — T. S. Eliot (who called Barker a genius — a view both shared and disputed by others), Herbert Read, Vernon Watkins, etc. — and specific places — Kew Gardens, Norfolk, Surrey, etc. Brought up in Battersea, Barker is variously remembered as the man who inspired Elizabeth Smart's “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept”, drinking chum of Dylan Thomas, collaborator in writing pornography with Anaïs Nin, and as the father of fifteen children by four different women born over a period of forty years. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44988 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
BLISH, James (James Benjamin), 1921-1975 : ANYWHEN. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First British edition of this collection of short stories from the by now British-based American master of science fiction. Eight stories (one more than the American edition of the same title) — “creatures that look like men but aren't; rodent custodians of lone planets; tobacco mosaic totally out of control; a society in which cleanliness is a vice; beggars literally led by dogs; pomander-poaching on Mars; the coming of heterosexuality to Titan; a hippy space hijacker”. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44911 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
BOVA, Ben (Benjamin William), 1932-2020 : THE DUELLING MACHINE. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First British edition. The much-admired third instalment in Bova’s loosely connected “Watchmen” series — peace throughout the universe maintained by the Star Watch with the aid of the duelling machine, a virtual reality device for sublimating individual conflict — until someone tinkers with the mechanism. Originally published (with the shorter American spelling “dueling”) in New York in 1969. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44918 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
BROWN, Richard, 1932- & BRETT, Stanley, 1920-2010 : THE LONDON BOOKSHOP. Pinner : Private Libraries Association, 1971. First edition : limited to 1,500 copies. An evocative record of some of the antiquarian bookshops of London fifty years ago. An introductory reminiscence from Percy Muir on his fifty years in the trade (and the shops he had known) is followed by a brief history and a generous ration of photographs (interiors, exteriors, and portraits) for each of the following: James Bain, Andrew Block, Louis W. Bondy, Stanley Crowe, H. M. Fletcher, Harold Mortlake, Bertram Rota, Charles J. Sawyer, Stanley Smith, Suckling & Co., and Bernard Quaritch. A second series was added in 1977. The present copy is enlivened by some manuscript annotation in pen and pencil — a correction to the introductory text; “poor shop stock” of one of the inhabitants of Cecil Court; “Boorish, ungracious to the point of rudeness ... shop full of rubbish” of another; “v. poor shop stock” of a third. SOLD |
![]() |
BROWNJOHN, Alan (Alan Charles), 1931- , HEANEY, Seamus, 1939-2013 & STALLWORTHY, Jon (Jon Howie), 1935-2014 — editors : NEW POEMS 1970-71 : A P.E.N. ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY. London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), (1971). First edition. An outstanding anthology of the fresh work of the period, with contributions from Dannie Abse, W. H. Auden, Patricia Beer, Tony Connor, Stanley Cook, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Douglas Dunn, James Fenton, John Fuller, Roy Fuller, Jean Overton Fuller, Thom Gunn, Ian Hamilton, Tony Harrison, Molly Holden, Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, Michael Longley, George Macbeth, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Pete Morgan, Peter Porter, Stevie Smith, Anthony Thwaite, Charles Tomlinson, and around twenty others. With biographical notes on all the contributors. SOLD |
![]() |
“BURGESS, Anthony” — [WILSON, John Anthony Burgess, 1917-1993] : MF. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition. “Totally naked, for God’s sake? All this happened a long time ago” — “A novel which no other writer could have achieved; in an outrageous entertainment it dramatizes the fashionable themes of the anthropologists about the relationship between language and family structure ... a rich feast of word-and-thought play: Greek tragedy and vaudeville on a single stage”. Claude Lévi-Strauss hand-bagged. SOLD |
![]() |
“CHARLES, Gerda” — [LIPSON, Edna, 1915-1996] : THE DESTINY WALTZ. London : Eyre & Spottiswoode, (1971). First edition. The recipient of the first ever Whitbread Novel of the Year award, her earlier novel “A Slanting Light” having taken the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1963. A novel framed around the making of a documentary on a forgotten Jewish poet (said to be based on Isaac Rosenberg). “We see not only human nature, often treacherous and fallible in action, but a panoramic view of English and Jewish life on many levels of society over the last fifty years”. The present copy is inscribed by the author on the title-page, “To Martyn with warmest good wishes and thanks for everything, Gerda” — the recipient being bookseller Martyn Goff (1923-2015), architect of the Bedford Square Book Bang held that summer, and soon to become the driving force behind the Booker Prize. £400 Currently on display at Bryars & Bryars in central London, please enquire about availability – books@ashrare.com |
![]() |
CHRISTIE, Agatha (Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa), 1890-1976 : NEMESIS. London : The Crime Club (William Collins, Sons & Co.), (1971). First edition. The last Miss Marple to be written (although the penultimate to be published). Miss Marple receives a letter and a request from a dead man — “With this first-rate story Dame Agatha triumphantly returns to the traditional detective novel” (Daily Mirror, 31st October 1971). SOLD |
![]() |
COMPTON, D.G. (David Guy), 1930- : HOT WIRELESS SETS, ASPIRIN TABLETS, THE SANDPAPER SIDES OF USED MATCHBOXES, AND SOMETHING THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN CASTOR OIL. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First British and first hardback edition. A world in chaos — plague, strikes and riots — and a group of scientists at a top-secret facility in Cornwall try to develop a method of time travel to escape it all. First published as “Chronocules” the previous year in paperback form in the United States, where this exiled British writer was declared Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2007. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44959 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
COMPTON-BURNETT, Ivy (Dame Ivy), 1884-1969 : THE LAST AND THE FIRST. London : Victor Gollancz, (1971). First edition. Her posthumously published final novel, found in manuscript across several exercise books after her death. An English country-house setting, around the turn of the last century, tyrannical step-mother, oppressed step-daughter, and all the vintage Compton-Burnett irony and dialogue, “more subtle and condensed than ever. Her final novel will be ranked among her finest”. With a foreword on the development of the book by Elizabeth Sprigge, and a critical epilogue by Charles Burkhart. SOLD |
![]() |
COOK, Peter (Peter Edward), 1937-1995 & MOORE, Dudley (Dudley Stuart John), 1935-2002 : THE DAGENHAM DIALOGUES. London : Methuen & Co., (1971). First edition. The two comedians’ cloth-capped and scarved alter egos, Dud and Pete, on the burning issues of the day — sex, art, music, religion, superstition, the very worst things in the world, etc. — the text of a dozen of the incredibly popular, absurd, and surreal comic dialogues made famous on the television programme, “Not Only But Also”. SOLD |
![]() |
COOPER, Lettice (Lettice Ulpha), 1897-1994 : LATE IN THE AFTERNOON. London : Victor Gollancz, 1971. First edition. The publisher’s file copy and so stamped on the front endpaper and the rear of the dust-jacket. Widowed and elderly Sybil Fairford lives on her Tuscan estate looking forward to the visit of a grand-daughter who never comes, but remains gracious to another visitor, an arrogant and pompous young hippie — the illegitimate child of her son’s wayward first wife. “Full of refreshing common sense ... this wise, unpretentious and enjoyable novel” (Wendy Monk in the Birmingham Daily Post, 19th June 1971). A Swedish writer once remarked of Lettice Cooper that “She is what we expect English people to be, but what they so seldom are”. SOLD |
![]() |
COTTON, John, 1925-2003 : THE WILDERNESS. Berkhamsted : Priapus Press, (1971). First edition : limited to 300 numbered copies. Inscribed, signed and dated (1971) by John Cotton. A single poem, with a cover design and a striking colour illustration by Rigby Graham. Loosely inserted is an additional hand-printed greetings card, also inscribed and signed by Cotton. SOLD |
![]() |
CROSSLEY-HOLLAND, Kevin, 1941- : WE ARE THE CHILD DERVISHES OF THE CHILTERNS ... Kettering : Nina Steane, [1971]. First edition. “We are the child dervishes of the Chilterns, We Whirl, We roll in chalk, We strike sparks from flint ...” — a broadside poem dramatically illustrated by Harry Housman of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre. Number 14 in Nina Steane’s “All In” series of poetry posters. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 27464 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
DU MAURIER, Daphne (Dame Daphne), 1907-1989 : NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT AND OTHER STORIES. London : Victor Gollancz, 1971. First edition. “If you are planning to lounge on the beach and want your blood agreeably chilled, this is a real winner” (Jean Richardson in the Birmingham Daily Post, 24th July 1971). Five long stories from “the mistress of the macabre” — “No cosy tales for reading to a maiden aunt or an elderly cousin. Venice — Crete — Ireland — Jerusalem — East Anglia: the settings are as various as the plots”. The opening story, “Don't Look Now”, was memorably filmed two years later by Nicolas Roeg, with Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
DUFFY, Maureen (Maureen Patricia), 1933- : LOVE CHILD. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First edition. The publisher’s file copy, stamped “Weidenfeld Library” on the front free endpaper. “Maureen Duffy may confuse but she never bores us ... This novel about the confusion and desperation of being young ... adds to Maureen Duffy’s reputation as an original and provocative writer” (Elizabeth Harvey in the Birmingham Daily Post, 1st May 1971). On holiday in Italy with wealthy parents, the precocious Kit sets out to destroy the burgeoning love affair between perfect mother and father’s new assistant with all the skill and concentration of a master spy. SOLD |
![]() |
DURRELL, Gerald (Gerald Malcolm), 1925-1995 : FILLETS OF PLAICE. London : William Collins Sons & Co., (1971). First edition. An ironic counterpart to his brother’s “Spirit of Place” (1969) — a couple of preliminary pages (“This is a nice retsina”), and five inimitable Durrell stories — the birthday party in Corfu (with the ice-box); life in a London pet-shop; the night the mamba fell on the District Commissioner; the saga of the nose-bleed; and the ravishing Ursula in Bournemouth. SOLD |
![]() |
DURRELL, Lawrence (Lawrence George), 1912-1990 : THE RED LIMBO LINGO : A POETRY NOTEBOOK. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition : one of 500 numbered copies (ex 600) produced for distribution in the United Kingdom. A sequence of poetic jottings, followed by twenty-one more formal poems, including “A Winter of Vampires”, “Pistol Weather”, “Revenants”, “Mistral”, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
“DYLAN, Bob” — [ZIMMERMAN, Robert Allen, 1941- ] : TARANTULA. London : MacGibbon & Kee, (1971). First British edition. His first book — “It is an astonishing, exasperating book; a beautiful, flowing, stormy prose poem. Tarantula is surrealism on speed, a phantasmagoric trip through America — seen by an impatient, restless, brilliant man stabbing at life with a lethal humour and a strange narrative power” (dust-jacket blurb by Michael Gray). Dylan was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. £100 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44926 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
ELEGANT, Robert S. (Robert Sampson), 1928- : MAO’S GREAT REVOLUTION. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First British edition. “Jammed into the hundred-acre plaza of the Gate of Heavenly Peace one August morning in 1966 were over a million young Chinese. Their bright crimson armbands proclaimed them the Red Guard. They were waiting to see their leader, Mao Tse-tung, ‘the red, red sun in our hearts’, waiting for the words that would send them streaming out over China in an outbreak of destruction and terror stimulated by idealism, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. A detailed and penetrating history from the multiple award-winning Anglo-American author and journalist, head of the Hong Kong Bureau of the Los Angeles Times in the years that mattered, as well as advisor to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45001 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
EWART, Gavin (Gavin Buchanan), 1916-1995 : THE GAVIN EWART SHOW : POEMS BY GAVIN EWART. London : Trigram Press, (1971). First edition : the wrappers issue. Signed by Gavin Ewart on the title-page, with the date of January 1976 in another hand. A collection of thirty-nine poems — as Philip Larkin noted, “well-shaped pieces, freaked with pain and absurdity” — including “On the Death of an Unpleasant Executive”, “People Will Say We’re in Love”, “Soho and West, Saturday Morning”, “Intimations of Mortality on the Lower Richmond Road”, “The Only Emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream”, etc. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44915 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence (Lawrence Monsanto), 1919-2021 : BACK ROADS TO FAR PLACES. New York : New Directions, (1971). First trade edition : a few copies of an “unripe version” had been printed for friends of the author under a slightly different title the previous year. “Let my Japanese Pen tell its story / They say it is made of bamboo shoot and / does not scatter / drops of black blood ...” — a single long poem of linked verses, with strong echoes of Japanese poetry and Tibetan Buddhist texts. Illustrations by Ferlinghetti, poet, painter and publisher — and one of the most influential figures of his time. SOLD |
![]() |
“FORESTER, C.S.” — [SMITH, Cecil Lewis Troughton, 1899-1966] : GOLD FROM CRETE : SHORT STORIES. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First edition. A posthumously published collection — eight short stories, all set during World War II, and mostly featuring Captain Crowe of the destroyer H.M.S. Apache — a Hornblower in modern dress — as he takes on the German navy in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, together with the novella, “If Hitler Had Invaded England” — “a little masterpiece” of what-might-have-been if Hitler had followed up on Dunkirk. SOLD |
![]() |
FORSYTH, Frederick (Frederick McCarthy), 1938- : THE DAY OF THE JACKAL. London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), (1971). First edition. The publishing jackpot of 1971 — the fictional plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle — soon turned into the award-winning 1973 Fred Zinneman movie with Edward Fox, Terence Alexander, etc. “It was an overdraft, ex-reporter, Frederick Forsyth told me that made him sit down and write his first novel. It took him thirty-five days. Three publishers turned it down. A fourth shilly-shallied so much that Forsyth took it away and submitted it to a fifth, who said yes, yes, yes. The result: so far it has brought in rather more than £7,000 for each of those thirty-five days — around a quarter of a million pounds, of which Forsyth’s share is some £150,000. And all before a word has been published. ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (Hutchinson, £2) comes out tomorrow” (Mark Kahn in the Sunday Mirror, 6th June 1971). The article later admits that although written in thirty-five days, “the research and accumulation of material took years”. SOLD |
![]() |
FRANCIS, Dick (Richard Stanley), 1920-2010 : BONECRACK. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First edition. Abduction and a famous Newmarket stables under threat — “Quite perfect little thriller about a rich loon who wants his amateur rider son to win the Derby. The doting parent will stop at nothing — not even at breaking the horses’ legs — to get his son the winning post. The narrative comes across in a nice horsey, heady style” (Belfast Telegraph, 18th June 1973). £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 39090 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
FRASER, George MacDonald, 1925-2008 : FLASH FOR FREEDOM! FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS 1848-1849. London : Barrie & Jenkins, (1971). First edition. “When Flashman was inveigled into a game of pontoon with Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck, he was making an unconscious choice about his own future — would it lie in the House of Commons or the West African slave trade? Was there, for that matter, very much difference?” — the third novel in the series. SOLD |
![]() |
GEOGRAPHIA : GEOGRAPHIA GREATER LONDON ATLAS : COMPLETE INDEX TO STREETS WITH POSTAL DISTRICTS. London : Geographia, [1971]. Eleventh edition, revised and extended. Originally published in 1930, but here revised and extended in scope, reaching out to Rickmansworth and Egham to the west; Radlett and Potters Bar to the north; Rainham and Dartford to the east, and Epsom and Purley to the south. Contents include a double-page key map, 210 fully indexed sectional maps in colour on a generous scale of three inches to the mile; six coloured sectional maps of the City and West End at over six inches to the mile; coloured double-page maps of the postal districts and the major roads; a map of the underground railway; and four endpaper maps of the theatres, cinemas, clubs and museums. SOLD |
![]() |
GOLDING, William (Sir William Gerald), 1911-1993 : THE SCORPION GOD : THREE SHORT NOVELS. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. “Golding at his playful, ironic and mysterious best” The title story set in ancient Egypt, together with “Clonk Clonk” from a primitive matriarchal society, and “Envoy Extraordinary” from Imperial Rome. SOLD |
![]() |
GOODALL, Jane (Dame Jane Morris), 1934- : IN THE SHADOW OF MAN. London : William Collins Sons & Co., (1971). First edition. “One of the Western World’s great scientific achievements” (Stephen Jay Gould) — a truly ground-breaking study, redefining humankind itself, based on ten years of research and living with chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. “The chimpanzees are man’s nearest relatives. Their family life and social hierarchies, their loyalties and vendettas, their sexual behaviour, their treatment of children and the old, have a strange relevance to the human condition. The author does not draw morals, but the morals are there for all to see”. Goodall established for the first time that the chimpanzees were by no means vegetarian, as previously thought, and that they were also capable of making simple tools — leading to her mentor Louis Leakey’s famous remark: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human”. SOLD |
![]() |
GORDIMER, Nadine, 1923-2014 : A GUEST OF HONOUR. First British edition. Winner of the 1971 James Tait Black Memorial Prize — “her major work so far, a novel of great substance and power describing an African nation’s struggle to be born and the course of an epic love affair” — an Englishman confronts the inadequacy of his liberal ideas. “Gordimer writes of blacks and whites, but her steady, unblinking eye sees something grey there. You could call it human nature and you would be right. Her true subject is humankind, as it is for every great writer” (Daily Telegraph). £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45004 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
GRAHAM, Henry, 1930-2019 : PASSPORT TO EARTH. London : Rapp & Whiting / André Deutsch, (1971). First edition : the hardback issue. Signed by Henry Graham on the title-page. A collection of twenty-nine poems from the Liverpool poet, including “Breakfast with Kafka”, “The Waltz of the Sea”, “Birds Make Ornithologists”, etc. “From his earliest output to the very end, his highly recognisable poetic voice had a distinctive style based on a dry, ironic wit” (from Brian Wake’s Guardian obituary, 20th March 2019). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 11288 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
GRAY, Simon (Simon James Holliday), 1936-2008 : BUTLEY. London : Methuen & Co., (1971). First edition : the wrappers issue. Probably his most successful play, first put on at the Criterion in July 1971, with Alan Bates playing the lead. It was directed by Harold Pinter, who later wrote: “I found its savage, lacerating wit hard to beat ... the play gives us a character who hurls himself towards destruction while living, in the fever of his intellectual hell, with a vitality and brilliance known to few of us. He courts death by remaining ruthlessly — even dementedly — alive. It’s a remarkable creation and Alan Bates as Butley gave the performance of a lifetime”. SOLD |
![]() |
GREENE, Graham (Henry Graham), 1904-1991 : A SORT OF LIFE. London : Bodley Head, (1971). First edition. An illuminating segment of autobiography, taking Greene’s life past his first encounter with espionage and up to his first genuine success with the publication of “Stamboul Train” in 1932 — complete with the changes in the text made off the cuff from a telephone box to ward off a threatened libel action from J. B. Priestley. “I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony”. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44921 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
GREER, Germaine, 1939- : THE FEMALE EUNUCH. New York : McGraw Hill Book Co., (1971). First American edition. “Feminists have always seemed to me to be particularly repulsive ... until I met Germaine Greer, an Australian who lectures in English literature at Warwick University. Miss Greer is about to publish a book about women’s rights called The Female Eunuch ... which is likely to take the notion of freedom for women somewhere far beyond its present boundaries. You may judge how far when I tell you that she wanted to call it, The Clitoris Strikes Back” (Quentin Crewe in the Sunday Mirror, 27th September 1970). First published in London towards the end of 1970, but it was the American edition which really propelled the author to global fame. SOLD |
![]() |
GUNN, Thom (Thomson William), 1929-2004 : MOLY. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. A collection of twenty-five poems — including the title-poem, as well as “The Colour Machine”, “Listening to Jefferson Airplane”, the LSD-inspired “At the Centre”, “Sunlight”, etc. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44924 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HAILEY, Arthur (Arthur Frederick), 1920-2004 : WHEELS. New York : Doubleday & Co., 1971. First edition. Signed by Arthur Hailey on a preliminary blank. The British-born writer with the best-selling novel of the year in the United States — “a barn-storming epic set in Detroit and describing the machinations, industrial and sociological, of the motor-car industry. ‘Hotel; Airport; and now Wheels’ runs the publisher’s blurb and one knows what to expect: executive skulduggery, sex, relentless competition, sex, power-jockeying, sex, the Mafia, sex” (Anthony Masters in the Birmingham Daily Post, 18th March 1972). Impeccably researched, as were all his novels, this one was turned into a television series in 1978, with Rock Hudson, Lee Remick, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
HANFF, Helene, 1916-1997 : 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD. London : André Deutsch, (1971). First British edition. “The idiosyncratic, irascible yet lovable bookseller, real or imagined, coping with a prosaic if not dull lot of buyers and non-buyers, has long been a cliché of a character. It is good, while the tribe is still in being, to have the roles reversed, and the part played by a customer” (contemporary review). Hanff’s epistolary love-affair with the Charing Cross Road bookshop of Marks & Co., improbably turned into a television play (1975) with Anne Jackson and Frank Finlay, a radio play, a stage play — winning an Actress of the Year for Rosemary Leach in 1982 — and the film in 1987, with Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
HARRIS, Wilson (Sir Theodore Wilson), 1921-2018 : THE AGE OF THE RAINMAKERS. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. Evidently a review copy, a printed Faber slip loosely inserted “With the author's compliments” and with a typed date of publication. Four mesmeric and haunting “fables” on the author’s native Guyana and its ethnic groups — Macusi, Arecuna, Wapisiana and Arawaks. With striking illustrations by Karen Usborne. £100 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44964 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HARRISON, Harry” — [DEMPSEY, Henry Maxwell, 1925-2012] — editor : THE YEAR 2000 : AN ANTHOLOGY. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First British edition. A baker’s dozen of commissioned and frequently challenging science fiction stories, all set in the year 2,000 but reflecting the preoccupations of 1970 — overpopulation, race relations, space exploration, starvation, and war. With contributions from Brian W. Aldiss (Orgy of the Living and the Dying); Bertram Chandler (Sea Change); Harrison himself (American Dead); Fritz Leiber (America the Beautiful); Naomi Mitchison (After the Accident); Chad Oliver (Far from this Earth); Mack Reynolds (Utopian); Thomas N. Scortia (Judas Fish); Robert Silverberg (Black is Beautiful), etc. With an introduction by Harrison, notes on the authors, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
HEANEY, Seamus, 1939-2013 & OTHERS : RESPONSES. [London] : National Book League & The Poetry Society, 1971. First edition : limited to 300 numbered copies, designed by Monica Schmoller and printed at the Westerham Press on handmade paper from Hodgkinson’s Wookey Hole Mill. An anthology of new poems on “committed” themes, specially commissioned from a well-chosen mix of established and younger poets, to celebrate and commemorate the 1971 Bedford Square Book Bang. Contributors include Dannie Abse, Patricia Beer, D. M. Black, Stewart Conn, D. J. Enright (Public Bar), Seamus Heaney (Servant Boy), Roger McGough, Adrian Mitchell, William Plomer (The Planes of Bedford Square), Vernon Scannell, Jon Silkin, Ted Walker, and half a dozen others. With an introduction by Clifford Simmons, biographical notes on the poets, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
HEANEY, Seamus, 1939-2013 & OTHERS : POETRY SUPPLEMENT : CHRISTMAS 1971. London : Poetry Book Society, 1971. First edition. A collection of fresh work, edited by Terry Eagleton. Poems from John Barrell, Douglas Dunn (This Year and Next), John Fuller (Lecture Room: Ten a.m.), Michael Hamburger (2 – The Glade and Consumed), Seamus Heaney (2 – The Tollund Man and Maighdean Mara), Jon Silkin (2 – I Picked a Stone Up and In this Miserable Time), James Simmons (The Bridge-Players), and Ted Walker (2). SOLD |
![]() |
HENRI, Adrian, 1932-2000 : AUTOBIOGRAPHY. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition : the hardback issue. A presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his publisher, the late Tom Maschler (1933-2020) — “for Tom, new poems for my new publisher — with love thanks”, signed in full, and dated January 1972. Autobiographical poem sequences from the most senior of the “Mersey Sound” poets — pre-war Liverpool, wartime in Rhyl, student days in Paris, a holiday in Norway, dialectics in Hampstead, Aldermaston marches, schoolteacher in the provinces, return to Liverpool and growing fame as performer, poet and painter. £200 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44943 — or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HEPWORTH, David, 1950- : 1971 : NEVER A DULL MOMENT. London : Bantam Press, (2016). First edition : the hardback issue. Music journalist, presenter and historian David Hepworth — “1971 saw the release of more monumental albums than any year before or since and the establishment of a pantheon of stars who would dominate the next forty years ... January that year fired the gun on an unrepeatable surge of creativity, technological innovation, blissful ignorance, naked ambition and outrageous good fortune. By December rock had exploded into the mainstream. How did it happen? This book tells you. It’s the story of 1971, rock’s golden year”. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44972 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HILL, Geoffrey (Sir Geoffrey William), 1932-2016 : MERCIAN HYMNS. London : André Deutsch, (1971). First edition : the rare hardback issue. The winner of the inaugural Whitbread Award for Poetry. A collection of thirty “prose-hymns”, all previously unpublished, with notes on King Offa, etc., and an introduction by C. H. Sisson. “These brilliantly exact verbal organizations are typical of the book: the activities of Mercia — coining, hammering, carving — are, first of all, the qualities of Mr Hill’s own poetic technique, so that style matches theme in a striking congruency” (TLS review). £200 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45015 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HILL, Susan (Dame Susan), 1942- : THE ALBATROSS AND OTHER STORIES. London : Hamish Hamilton, (1971). First edition. The title story, together with four further stories — “The Elephant Man”, “Friends of Miss Reece”, “Cockles and Mussels”, and “Somerville”. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for 1972. “Susan Hill has never written anything as deeply moving”. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44908 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HILL, Susan (Dame Susan), 1942- : STRANGE MEETING. London : Hamish Hamilton, (1971). First edition. “The most interesting, original and encouraging novel from a young novelist for a long time ... her most ambitious novel to date, a delicate, oblique story, set mainly on the Western Front in the First World War, about a close relationship between two young infantry officers ... beautifully written, moving, lyrical, tense with the sights, smells and din of the Western Front” (Keith Brace, in the Birmingham Daily Post, 23rd October 1971). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45065 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HOBHOUSE, Hermione, 1934-2014 : LOST LONDON : A CENTURY OF DEMOLITION AND DECAY. London : Macmillan London, (1971). First edition. A pictorial chronicle of the often needlessly abandoned and destroyed buildings of London over the previous century — mansions, churches, quartiers, public buildings, commerce, hotels and restaurants, transport, and buildings under threat. A powerful plea for common sense in these matters from the architectural historian, Secretary of the Victorian Society, and general editor of the Survey of London. SOLD |
![]() |
HOFFMAN, Abbie (Abbot Howard), 1936-1989 : STEAL THIS BOOK. New York : Pirate Editions, (1971). First edition : the regular paperback issue. Counter-culture reaches its peak with a book rejected by thirty publishers, never popular with the owners of bookshops for obvious reasons, and now uncommon — “A handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock Nation”, with sections on free food; free clothing and furniture; free transportation; free land; free housing, etc., as well as the underground press; guerrilla broadcasting; demonstrations; street fighting; stink bombs, smoke bombs and pipe bombs; hip-pocket law; shoplifting, other books worth stealing, etc. Pleasing to see cricket playing its part — “At both Van Cortland Park in the Bronx and Walker Park on Staten Island every Sunday afternoon there are free cricket matches ... free tea and crumpets are served during intermission. I say!” p.242. £200 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45024 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HOLST, Spencer, 1926-2001 : THE LANGUAGE OF CATS AND OTHER STORIES. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First British edition. “A cross between Hans Christian Andersen and Franz Kafka” — twenty of the famous New York underground performer’s miniature stories and fables, including “The Zebra Storyteller”, “The Santa Claus Murderer”, “Bullfinch and Goblin”, “The Hidden Ballroom at Versailles”, etc. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44913 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HUGHES, James, 1937- : ENDS. London : Secker & Warburg, (1971). First British edition. “It is London, tomorrow. The government has announced that Cessation is only a few weeks off; in the meantime, most people are planning their own particular ends, and those with the most status and privilege are preparing to go City — that is, to embark for the fabulous End City on the south-west coast” — the young Starvies are passive, the Failergoners weak-willed and indecisive, and the Lifers fight back. “Ostensibly this book is a skilful and successful piece of science fiction, but it is more than that. It is a devastatingly uncomfortable view of the way we live now” (Victoria Brittain in the Illustrated London News, 1st October 1971, on this British author first published in the United States). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45023 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
HUGHES, Ted (Edward James), 1930-1998 : CROW : FROM THE LIFE AND SONGS OF CROW. New York : Harper & Row, (1971). First American edition : contains seven more poems than the British edition, which had appeared five months earlier, taking the total number of poems to well over sixty. The jacket quotes extensively from the British reviews — “English poetry has found a new hero” (Peter Porter); “Hughes now joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit. I think he is the only British poet to have done so” (A. Alvarez); “An amazingly sustained, unified performance” (Alan Brownjohn); “A most extraordinary work of genius” (C. B. Cox). SOLD |
![]() |
HUGHES, Ted (Edward James), 1930-1998 : CROW WAKES. Woodford Green : Poet and Printer, (1971). First edition : limited to 200 copies, with an additional “no more than thirty” copies for academic or review purposes. In theory, half of the 200 copies were to be distributed by the publisher and half given to Hughes, but there was evidently a certain amount of muddle. The present example is from Hughes’ own personal stock and numbered 71/88 below his signature on the front free endpaper. A collection of twelve poems, including the title-poem, as well as “Bones”, “Amulet”, “Snow Song”, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
INNES, Hammond (Ralph Hammond), 1913-1998 : LEVKAS MAN. London : William Collins Sons & Co., 1971. First edition. Signed by the author on the title-page. “I have been researching ‘Levkas Man’ for the last ten years ... and it means more to me than any other book I have written” — a complex tale, inspired by Louis Leakey’s discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge, of a rogue anthropologist in search of humankind’s arrival in Europe. The typical Innes action moves from Amsterdam to Malta and on to the Greek islands, but “Collins have had complaints about the erudite-looking dust-cover ... ‘We didn’t want to give the wrong impression by having a cloak-and-dagger sort of cover’, said Innes. ‘The book is about a love-hate relationship between a young man and the anthropologist who had adopted him’” (Newcastle Journal, 20th February 1971). “People say people can’t write stories any more. Tell that to Hammond Innes” (Sunday Times). SOLD |
![]() |
JACKSON, Peter (Peter Charles Geoffrey), 1922-2003 : LONDON BRIDGE. London : Cassell & Co., (1971). First edition. “London exists because of London Bridge” — a richly illustrated history of the bridge in its various incarnations — the early wooden bridges, the nineteen-arched stone bridge — “a wonder of the medieval world”, Rennie’s elegant nineteenth-century design, and its just-built replacement. “Let the whole Earth now all Her wonders count, This Bridge of Wonders is the Paramount” (James Howell, 1657). SOLD |
![]() |
JAMES, P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy), 1920-2014 : SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. Inscribed, signed and dated (26th May 1980) by the author — “For Ruth and Al With every good wish” — the recipients being Ruth and Al Windfeldt of Scene of the Crime Fine Books in Sherman Oaks. Killer at large in a training-school for nurses, Adam Dalgliesh is called in — the fourth Dalgliesh novel and the one which cemented her reputation, winner of the CWA Silver Dagger and runner-up in the Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award. SOLD |
![]() |
“JANSON, Hank” : THE KAY ASSIGNATION. London : Gold & Warburton, (1971). First edition. “What a cracker! She had the face, figure and personality to make men breathe more heavily and have carnal thoughts ... Kay may have been a cracker, but she was not all she was cracked up to be” — “Hank Janson” was originally a pseudonym adopted by Stephen Daniel Frances (1917-1989) in 1948, but had long since become a house-name used by a variety of other and increasingly desperate authors. The present title was among the last handful of Jansons — no more were to appear after 1971 until the recent reprints of some of the early titles. SOLD |
![]() |
JOHNSON, B.S. (Brian Stanley William), 1933-1973 : HOUSE MOTHER NORMAL : A GERIATRIC COMEDY. London : William Collins Sons & Co., (1971). First edition. Johnson in a nursing home for the old people’s Social Evening — the events experienced in different ways by nine different protagonists. Researched largely by talking to old people in the pubs of Islington. “His originality, inventiveness and technical skills have never been deployed with finer artistry or to greater effect, nor have they ever been used on a theme which he has treated with greater feeling and integrity”. SOLD |
![]() |
JOHNSON, Diane, 1934- : BURNING. London : William Heinemann, (1971). First British edition. Signed by the author on the half-title. Her third novel — the removal of their hedge as a fire-precaution leaves Bingo and Barney Edwards of Bel Air defenceless and exposed to the farcical madness of contemporary Los Angeles — hippies, junkies, the alternative psychiatrist-cum-guru next door, his patients, brushes with firemen, welfare services, the police, ice-plants, and the realities of the fire when it comes. “A brilliant comic novel ... full of extraordinary characters and events” (Alison Lurie). £75 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44982 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
JOHNSON, Timothy, 1942- : NETWORK COMMUNITIES : THE COMPUTERS IN OUR LIVES. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First edition. “For most people the machines remain mysterious, clattering away to themselves behind the glass walls of air-conditioned temples, attended by a highly paid few”. A well-written demystification and a remarkably prescient analysis of the extent to which computers were already making an impact on everyday lives, with references to online networks, databanks, etc. “By 1980, with millions of terminals online ... there will already be a substantial class of people ... able to work largely at home with the aid of a terminal and perhaps a picturephone”. SOLD |
![]() |
JONES, Gareth Stedman, 1942- : OUTCAST LONDON : A STUDY IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CLASSES IN VICTORIAN SOCIETY. London : Oxford University Press, (1971). First edition. A fine study of the urban poor, backed up with a mountain of documentary and statistical evidence, of that crucial late Victorian period when the emphasis shifted from charitable endeavour for the poor destined always to be with us, to a belief that poverty could (and should) be eradicated by genuine structural change. A fascinating counterpoint to Dickens, Gissing, Mayhew and Booth. “One of the most stimulating and in the best sense provocative studies of Victorian London which have yet appeared” (Asa Briggs). SOLD |
![]() |
KEATING, H.R.F. (Henry Reymond Fitzwalter), 1926-2011 : INSPECTOR GHOTE GOES BY TRAIN. London : William Collins Sons & Co. (The Crime Club), (1971). First edition. The diffident detective travels across India by rail — the routine chore is not all it seems. “The Bombay CID inspector so amiably created by Mr. Keating figures this time in a battle of wits, staged entirely in an express carriage” (Belfast Telegraph, 10th January 1972). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 23645 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
KERR, Judith (Anna Judith Gertrud Helene), 1923-2019 : WHEN HITLER STOLE PINK RABBIT. London : Collins, (1971). First edition. “Suppose your country began to change. Suppose that without noticing it, it became dangerous for some people to live in any longer ... That is what happened to Anna in Germany in 1933 ... Perhaps not quite a novel. Most of it is true”. The first instalment of her “Out of the Hitler Time” trilogy. SOLD |
![]() |
KERTÉSZ, André (Andor), 1894-1985 : ON READING. New York : Grossman Publishers, 1971. First edition. A delightful sequence of sixty-six photographs of books and people reading from the Hungarian master photographer, the son of a Budapest bookseller — photographs from throughout his career — Hungary in 1915; Paris in the 1920s, 1930s, and again in the 1960s; New York from the 1930s to 1970; Connecticut in the 1950s; Buenos Aires in 1962; New Orleans in 1966; Japan in 1968, etc. £75 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44993 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
LESSING, Doris (Doris May), 1919-2013 : BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition. A man with no memory found wandering on the Embankment — a descent into madness and alternative worlds — short-listed for the Booker Prize and “her most astounding imaginative achievement — a rare work which explores new areas of thought”. SOLD |
![]() |
LOWRY, Malcolm (Clarence Malcolm), 1909-1957 : OCTOBER FERRY TO GABRIOLA. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First British edition. Lowry’s final novel, completed in draft form before his death and edited from his marginal notes and instructions by his widow, Margerie Bonner. A journey “on which hangs the meaning of his being” to the island off Vancouver. “Had he lived and worked it into the dense rich complexity of Under the Volcano it would have been another such masterpiece ... the familiar Lowry hallmarks of occultism, subtlety with words, vivid recurring images, the theme of lost homes and an endless journey ... Lowry’s search for humanity’s lost equilibrium” (Victoria Brittain in the Illustrated London News, 1st November 1971). “A species of ecstatic prose that has all but gone out of existence” (Matthew Corrigan in the New York Times, 25th October 1970). £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45060 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
McCARTHY, Mary (Mary Therese), 1912-1989 : BIRDS OF AMERICA. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1971). First edition. Signed by Mary McCarthy on the title-page. “An absorbing novel about a young man’s voyage into adulthood, enlivened by Mary McCarthy’s needling wit ... an authentic and thoughtful slice of cultural history” (Hilary Mantel). Dodging the draft in 1960s Paris — “Fiercely intelligent, insatiably combative, McCarthy’s novels invite controversy” (Penelope Lively). “Miss McCarthy provides some exquisitely funny scenes, but as usual in her writing the pain is left visible not so much as an inch under the surface” (Victoria Brittain, in the Illustrated London News, 1st November 1971). £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45066 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
“McGIRR, Edmund” — [GILES, Kenneth, 1922-1972] : NO BETTER FIEND. London : Victor Gollancz, 1971. First edition. “There’s a corpse in the copse ...” — a seedy literary hanger-on found dead on his way to see his editor in Kent — American private eye Jim Piron, some ripely eccentric characters, the author’s sardonic humour, and a fine English country-house murder. “McGirr at his splendidly ingenious and exhilarating best”. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44998 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
McGOUGH, Roger (Roger Joseph), 1937- : AFTER THE MERRYMAKING. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition : the scarce hardback issue. At that time probably better-known for his membership of “The Scaffold”, and in particular “Lily the Pink”, but here with his third solo collection of poems and already en route to becoming President of the Poetry Society. Forty-seven poems in three sequences — “There is the off-beat sense of humour and the compulsive juggling with sounds and appearances of words. But behind the smile is a very serious man with a highly individualistic perception, savagely satirical, and surprisingly lyrical” (Belfast Telegraph, 3rd December 1971). £125 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44932 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
McKUEN, Rod (Rodney Marvin), 1933-2015 : LONESOME CITIES. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First British edition. Signed by McKuen on the half-title. A collection of over forty love poems and lyrics from the Californian singer-songwriter — “The Art of Catching Trains”, followed by poems for San Francisco, Paris, Venice, London, Cheyenne, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Gstaad, and two further sequences. Reportedly the best-selling poet in history at that point, with his own television show on the BBC in 1971 — “The masses ate him up with a spoon, while highbrow literary critics roasted him on a spit” (Julia Keller). Interesting now to contrast his reputation with that of his friend and frequent collaborator, Jacques Brel. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45019 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MALAMUD, Bernard, 1914-1986 : THE TENANTS. New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (1971). First edition. A Jewish writer with writer’s block and a black writer, “between soul and revolution”, in a New York tenement — co-tenants of a landlord keen to evict. “Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of New York. He was a myth-maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables ... He is a rich original of the first rank” (Saul Bellow). £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45028 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MÁRQUEZ, Gabriel García, 1927-2014 : NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL. 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”. £200 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44933 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MILLER, Henry (Henry Valentine), 1891-1980 : MY LIFE AND TIMES. New York : Gemini Smith / Playboy Press, (1971). First edition. The richly illustrated life and times of a much-banned author — writing, painting, California, Paris, childhood — “Today’s naked generation has learned nearly everything from him — everything, that is to say, except his bookishness, his capacity for recapturing innocence, his sense of wonder, his sense of words ... Miller talking his life instead of writing it (he has written it already) ... Durrell thinks that Miller’s lifework is the best confessional writing since Rousseau. He is probably right” (Anthony Burgess in the New York Times, 2nd January 1972). £100 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45011 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MILLIGAN, Spike (Terence Alan), 1918-2002 : ADOLF HITLER : MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First edition. “A man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless; he said, ‘As from eleven o’clock we are at war with Germany’. (I loved the WE) ...”. Autobiography, truth, and humour from Milligan, who performed (rather than read) parts of the book at the Bedford Square Book Bang to tumultuous applause that summer. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44956 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MOORCOCK, Michael (Michael John), 1939- : THE SLEEPING SORCERESS : AN ELRIC NOVEL. London : New English Library, (1971). First edition. “For ten thousand years did the Bright Empire of Melniboné rule the world by virtue of her Sorcerer Kings, her Dragon Hordes and her golden battle barges ...” — the action taking place between the earlier short stories of “The Singing Citadel” and “The Stealer of Souls” — and Moorcock already hailed in the publisher’s blurb as “the greatest living writer of heroic fantasy”. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44999 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MORRIS, Desmond (Desmond John), 1928- : INTIMATE BEHAVIOUR. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition. “To be intimate means to be close, and I must make it clear at the outset that I am treating this literally” — the zoologist examines the whole range of human intimacy from social to sexual, and the overwhelming and increasingly forgotten importance to the human animal of touching and physical contact — from eye contact, a handshake, or a pat on the back, to the hug, the caress, and the kiss and beyond. “The female navel, at any rate, will never be the same again” wrote Mordecai Richler in the New York Times, 5th March 1972. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45006 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MORTIMER, Penelope (Penelope Ruth), 1918-1999 : THE HOME. London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), (1971). First edition. Eleanor Strathearn leaves a bleak flat and a dead marriage to create a new home for herself and her five more or less grown-up children. “Eleanor is one of Penelope Mortimer’s smartingly vulnerable and ultimately devastated heroines ... her best and strongest book by far — brilliantly particularised and achingly alive” (Kirkus Review, 1st March 1972). “She writes with a frankness and conviction that give one the uneasy and yet thrilling feeling of eavesdropping on real life” (Jean Richardson in the Birmingham Daily Post, 18th September 1971). SOLD |
![]() |
MOSLEY, Nicholas, 1923-2017 : NATALIE NATALIA : A NOVEL. London : Hodder & Stoughton, (1971). First edition. “I was a politician and I was getting out of politics because I was ashamed ... I went to that part of the country I was supposed to represent — represent as a hole might represent a bucket”. Stream of consciousness and a mind in torment from Anthony Greville, M.P. — politics, adultery — “I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia, when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel” — and excursions into the interplay of power and politics. “An outstanding novel. It throws into the melting-pot the whole problem of the predicament of living and it needs to be read more than once” (Elizabeth Harvey for the Birmingham Daily Post, 26th June 1971). “One of the most interesting and gifted English novelists writing today” (Vernon Scannell). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45003 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
MUIR, Percy (Percy Horace), 1894-1979 : VICTORIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS. London : B. T. Batsford, (1971). First edition. A well illustrated and wide-ranging survey, by one of the best of antiquarian booksellers, of (mainly British) illustrated books of the nineteenth century — with chapters on chapbooks; Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank; line engraving; the periodicals; the Dalziels; the advent of colour; fin-de-siècle; foreign influence; America, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
NAIPAUL, V.S. (Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932-2018 : IN A FREE STATE. 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). £100 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44955 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
NATIONAL BOOK LEAGUE : THE BEDFORD SQUARE BOOK BANG : 28 MAY — 11 JUN 1971. London : National Book League, 1971. First edition. A prospectus for Martyn Goff’s spectacular demonstration of the continuing relevance of the book, to be held in Bedford Square — “books — like discs, like TV, like cassettes — are fun”. Gives advance details of some of the planned activities: themed stalls; a science fiction evening with James Blish and John Brunner; crime with Julian Symons; an occult evening; B. S. Johnson on the new novel; poet’s corner; performances for children; and of course a bookshop. A further section outlines the projected finances, guarantees, sponsorship, income, admission charges — the whole event to cost something under £40,000, most of which would be recouped. Printed by the Shenval Press. SOLD |
![]() |
OSBORNE, John (John James), 1929-1994 : VERY LIKE A WHALE. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition : the hardback issue. A play written for television — a rich and powerful industrialist starts to pull apart his crumbling private life. The play was eventually turned into a film for television in 1980, with Alan Bates and Gemma Jones — “Osborne has this time tackled a subject worthy of his talents” (Liverpool Echo, 13th February 1980). £20 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44907 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PAINE, Lauran (Lauran Bosworth), 1916-2001 :A GAGGLE OF GHOSTS. London : Robert Hale, (1971). First edition. An intriguing examination from this prolific American author of the whole field of ghosts, hauntings, apparitions, manifestations, poltergeists, spirit voices, etc., with chapters on individual cases — “Borley Rectory”, “The Dark Lady of Bognor Regis”, “The Affair at Tedworth”, etc. With a bibliography, index, etc. There would appear to be no equivalent American edition. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45062 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PALMER, Tony, 1941- : THE TRIALS OF OZ. [London] : Blond & Briggs, (1971). First edition. “It is this case, and cases such as these, which stand at the cross-roads of our liberty ... Members of the Jury, this is a case about dissent ... we are all of us, totally entitled to disagree with their views; but this is a case about whether or not they are also entitled to disagree with us” (John Mortimer Q.C. in his opening address). Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson on trial over the notorious “Schoolkids” issue of the magazine “Oz” — an account rushed out by film director Tony Palmer in August 1971 in the wake of the longest obscenity trial in British history, which had taken place over six weeks in June and July. Among the defence witnesses were George Melly, Caroline Coon, Edward de Bono, Hans Eysenck, John Peel, Marty Feldman, Ronald Dworkin, and Feliks Topolski, who provided the illustrations. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44930 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PATTEN, Brian, 1946- : THE IRRELEVANT SONG. London : George Allen & Unwin, (1971). First edition : the hardback issue. His third collection of poetry — over forty poems, including “At Four O’Clock in the Morning”, “Through All Your Abstract Reasoning”, “Heroine Bitches”, “Interruption at the Opera House”, etc. “A sensibility profoundly aware of the ever-present possibility of the magical and the miraculous, as well as of the granite-hard realities. These are undiluted poems, beautifully calculated, informed — even in their darkest moments — with courage and hope” (Charles Causley). £75 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44958 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PAZ, Octavio, 1914-1998 : CONFIGURATIONS. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition in English. The first major collection of poetry by the Mexican Nobel Prize winner to be published in the British Isles — Paz at that time lecturing at Cambridge. Poems from his collections “Salamandra” (1958-1961) and “Ladera Este” (1962-1968), together with the stand-alone poems “Sun Stone” (1957) and “Blanco” (1966) — all given in parallel Spanish and English text versions — the translations by Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Tomlinson and others, as well as Paz himself. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45017 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PICASSO Pablo (Pablo Ruiz), 1881-1973 : PICASSOS IN LONDON : A TRIBUTE ON HIS 90TH BIRTHDAY. London : ICA, [1971]. First edition. An attractively produced catalogue, designed by Edward Wright and printed at the Shenval Press, of the 1971 London exhibition — although limited to forty-five loans from collectors living in London, an impressive array. With an introduction by Sir Roland Penrose (1900-1984). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44990 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PINTER, Harold, 1930-2008 : OLD TIMES. London : Methuen & Co., (1971). First edition. A married couple of twenty years await a visit from the wife’s old flatmate — troubling and conflicting memories surface. “The most technically daring play that Harold Pinter has written. Mr Pinter proceeds from complexity to complexity, but it is dangerous to suppose that the ambiguity of a new Pinter play is merely a development of the ambiguity of the one that preceded it ... one of the finest plays, one of the most mind-startling, one of the most immaculately written, of its generation. But it is not as simple as Beatrix Potter” (Harold Hobson in a contemporary review). SOLD |
![]() |
PLATH, Sylvia, 1932-1963 : CROSSING THE WATER. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. “I believe one should be able to control and manipulate experiences”. A collection of thirty-four poems, mainly from the years 1960-1961, and including “Parliament Hill Fields”, “Stillborn”, “Heavy Women”, “Love Letter”, “Small Hours”, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
PLATH, Sylvia, 1932-1963 : WINTER TREES. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. “My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark”. Eighteen poems from the final months of Plath’s life, including “Gigolo”, “Childless Woman” and “Purdah”, together with the slightly earlier “Three Women”. With a short introductory note by Ted Hughes. £100 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44912 – or simply click on the button 1 |
![]() |
POWELL, Anthony (Anthony Dymoke), 1905-2000 : BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM : A NOVEL. London : William Heinemann, (1971). First edition. The tenth volume in the series, as the “Dance to the Music of Time” enters its final movement. Austerity in post-war literary London, the eccentric and egotistical X. Trapnel, the rascally Widmerpool, now an M.P., and Pamela Flitton — “probably the vilest, rudest, most odious woman in fiction ... sulky, ill-bred, beautiful”, as Elizabeth Harvey put it in a contemporary review. £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44969 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
PRATCHETT, Terry (Sir Terence David John), 1948-2015 : THE CARPET PEOPLE. Gerrards Cross : Colin Smythe, 1971. First edition. “There is magic in every carpet. Cities and villages exist right under your feet ...” — his first book. “A reviewer who stumbles upon a book of what he considers to be quite extraordinary quality also finds himself in some difficulty. The language of praise has become so debased — notably by book reviewers — that it’s not easy either to sound convincing or to do justice ... Am I too enthusiastic? Well, it’s that I feel it’s a new dimension in imagination and the prose is beautiful” (Rosemarie Doyle in The Irish Times). Loosely inserted is a manuscript note from the publisher, Colin Smythe, on his business notepaper — “Sorry, I forgot this in my letter: the enclosed may amuse you, also by T. P.”, attached to which are press-cuttings of the review quoted above and ten entertaining 1973 Pratchett cartoons depicting goings-on at the government’s fictional “Warlock Hall” paranormal research establishment, as published in Smythe’s publication, the “Psychic Researcher”, as well as an example of Smythe’s personal ex-libris label. SOLD |
![]() |
QUAYLE, Eric (Eric Stanley), 1921-2001 : THE COLLECTOR’S BOOK OF BOOKS. London : Studio Vista, (1971). First edition. “The first general work to be published which considers the entire history of English literature from the viewpoint of the book-collector ... The major auction houses regularly present book sales, and prices have risen dramatically; yet it is still possible for the poorest amateur to build a satisfying library at a modest cost” — with chapters on points and pitfalls; the earliest printed books; novels and romances; poetry; drama; science and medicine; travel and topography; natural history; early children’s books; detective fiction; bindings and binding styles, etc., with a glossary, a list of abbreviations, a concise bibliography, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
RAPHAEL, Frederic (Frederic Michael), 1931- : WHO WERE YOU WITH LAST NIGHT? London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First edition. “When a woman tells you her past, you can be sure she intends you to be her future, you can quote me there” — the interior monologue of a very ordinary man with a mind to murder his wife. “Its theme is the habitual duplicity of civilized life. Conspiracy, says Frederic Raphael, is the inevitable partner of permanence; we share our beds with strangers”. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44935 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
RAVEN, Simon (Simon Arthur Nöel), 1927-2001 : SOUND THE RETREAT. London : Anthony Blond, (1971). First edition. The elusive seventh novel in the “Alms for Oblivion” sequence. It is 1945 and “there is a feeling of Domesday over every white man in India ... Simon Raven goes back in time to the hectic death throes of the Indian Empire, when Tradition and Honour were giving way to Riot, Nationalism and Hatred”. SOLD |
![]() |
RENDELL, Ruth (Ruth Barbara), 1930-2015 : ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN. London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), (1971). First edition. Crossword addict Stanley Manning has his eyes on his wife’s inheritance from his hated mother-in-law — “a man dominated by greed, who discovers, as his nerve goes, that a harmless hobby may become an over-ruling obsession”. £125 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44919 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
“RHINEHART, Luke” — [COCKCROFT, George Powers, 1932-2020] : THE DICE MAN. New York : William Morrow & Co., 1971. First edition. “When I read The Dice Man fifteen years ago, I wanted to know who had written it, and why. It read more like an act of survival than a novel, but whether it was the author’s survival or mine, I wasn’t sure. I had stopped drinking alcohol and I was looking, simply, for another drug. The book made me high; it offered multiple universes, all of them safer than vodka” (Tanya Gold in The Guardian, 4th March 2017). The fictional autobiography of a bored New York psychiatrist who persuades himself and his patients to surrender their will to the random roll of the dice — the dicelife. His first book and not an immediate success, as evidenced by the remainder mark on the bottom edge of this copy, but gradually to become the ultimate cult novel of its time. SOLD |
![]() |
RILEY, Bridget (Bridget Louise), 1931- : BRIDGET RILEY : PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS 1951-71. [London] : Arts Council, 1971. First edition. A richly illustrated catalogue of the memorable 1971 retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery — an exhibition which also toured Europe. Notes of the 227 exhibits by the artist from West Norwood, with an introduction and a biographical note by Bryan Robertson, notes of previous exhibitions, a bibliography, etc. SOLD |
![]() |
ROBSON, Jeremy, 1939- — editor : THE YOUNG BRITISH POETS. London : Chatto & Windus, 1971. First edition. Twenty-three poets aged under thirty-five — a fine anthology with biographical notes and some captivating period portrait photographs. Contributors include Stewart Conn (5 poems), Kevin Crossley-Holland (3), Peter Dale (4), Douglas Dunn (5), John Fuller (4), Ian Hamilton (4), Tony Harrison (4), a Beatle-cropped Seamus Heaney (5), Brian Jones (4), Angela Langfield (3), Michael Longley (4), Derek Mahon (5), Dom Moraes (5), Brian Patten (3), Jeremy Robson himself (4), Jon Stallworthy (5), Hugo Williams (4), and half a dozen others. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44944 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
ROTH, Philip (Philip Milton), 1933-2018 : OUR GANG (STARRING TRICKY AND HIS FRIENDS). New York : Random House, (1971). First edition. A raging satire on Richard Nixon, still President in 1971, and the debasement of political language to the Orwellian formula — “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Dwight Macdonald in the New York Times called it “far-fetched, unfair, tasteless, disturbing, logical, coarse and very funny ... in short, a masterpiece”. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44984 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
“SAGAN, Françoise” — [QUOIREZ, Françoise, 1935-2004] : SUNLIGHT ON COLD WATER. 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”. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44995 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
SCOTT, Paul (Paul Mark), 1920-1978 : THE TOWERS OF SILENCE : A NOVEL. London : William Heinemann, (1971). First edition. “Gathered at Pankot are the wives, daughters, mothers and widows of officers, a microcosm of English society — rigid with a sense of duty and brittle with the awareness of class”. The elusive third novel in Scott’s “Raj Quartet” — the war draws to its final stages — “It can no longer be denied that Japanese soldiers with guns and paper umbrellas may appear on the golf course at Pankot”. SOLD |
![]() |
SCOTT-JAMES, Anne (Anne Eleanor, Lady Lancaster), 1913-2009 : DOWN TO EARTH. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First edition. The pioneering journalist with the first of her much-admired books on gardening — “not so much a textbook as a treasury of ideas. Ideas on designing and planting, ideas for the winter garden and the wild garden, ideas for planting the odd corner or filling the August gap, ideas for hedges and climbing plants, paths and windbreaks, ideas on books to read and gardens to visit”. Loosely inserted is a single-page typed letter on her headed notepaper, signed with forename and with manuscript addition and corrections, from the author to her friend Candida [Lycett Green], referring to both Osbert Lancaster (the author’s husband) and John Betjeman, the first volume of whose letters, edited by Lycett Green (his daughter), had just appeared. “I liked Vol. I. So much, especially your linking pieces” appears as a manuscript postscript to the letter. SOLD |
![]() |
SEARLE, Ronald (Ronald William Fordham), 1920-2011 : THE ADDICT : A TERRIBLE TALE. London : Dennis Dobson, (1971). First edition. A delightful little squib — “Dr Searle, face to face as always with the sicknesses of twentieth-century society, has now confronted the terrible problem of addiction. In this book he concisely and graphically crystallizes the horror and degradation of those who are slaves to narcotics ... Take a trip with Searle. NB The Addict’s moment of truth has been tactfully concealed from casual gaze by sealing the last two pages”. £20 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44957 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
SENDAK, Maurice (Maurice Bernard), 1928-2012 : IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN. London : Bodley Head, (1971). First British edition. “I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!” — “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. God bless milk and God bless me!” — Sendak’s tour-de-force for toddlers, banned in some parts of the world for “gratuitous nudity”. SOLD |
![]() |
SHARPE, Tom (Thomas Ridley), 1928-2013 : RIOTOUS ASSEMBLY. London : Martin Secker & Warburg, (1971). First edition. His first novel and an extraordinary debut — in a sleepy South African town a wealthy spinster of impeccably imperial British family informs the chief of police that she has shot her Zulu cook — not a problem, until it emerges that this was a crime of illicit and distinctly unusual passion. “Readers of this wholly original first novel may find it hard to decide whether they are faint with laughter or staggering from shock”. SOLD |
![]() |
SHAW, Bob (Robert), 1931-1996 : 1 MILLION TOMORROWS. London : Victor Gollancz, 1971. First British and first hardback edition. Inscribed and signed by Belfast-born Bob Shaw on the title-page. “A tale of intrigue and double dealings ... a new drug that produces immortality. There is already a drug, but it has the side effect that it makes men impotent: the new one does not ... when it is offered to the manufacturer’s cost accountant for trial, someone starts trying to kill him. This fast, hard-hitting story is the best so far from this author” (James Clayton in the Birmingham Daily Post, 12th June 1971). First published in paperback in New York the previous year. £125 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45022 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
SIMENON, Georges (Georges Joseph Christian), 1903-1989 : TEDDY BEAR. London : Hamish Hamilton, (1971). First edition in English of “L’Ours en Peluche” (1960). “Professor Chabot is haunted by the idea of suicide and speculates on how the news will affect his wife, children, and mistress ... But it is not suicide which will end the story of Professor Chabot”. Translated from the French by John Clay. SOLD |
![]() |
SOLZHENITSYN, Alexander (Aleksandr Isaevich), 1918-2008 : STORIES AND PROSE POEMS. London : Bodley Head, (1971). First edition in English. Six novellas and short stories, together with sixteen poems from the winner of 1970 Nobel Prize, “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. Translated by Michael Glenny. “His new collection, with its stoical, plain, inward beauty, movingly reminds us that Solzhenitsyn seems never to have written a line that was not somehow tinged with hope” (Kirkus Review). £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45050 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
SOUTHERN, Terry, 1924-1995 : RED-DIRT MARIJUANA AND OTHER TASTES. London : Jonathan Cape, (1971). First British edition. “‘That ain’t no ordinary loco-weed’, said C.K. — that there is red-dirt marijuana, that’s what that is’. A black farm-hand, a twelve-year-old white boy and a cow stumble on their own ‘pot’ plant in a patch of dwarf cactus — to the benefit of all three”. Twenty-three stories and other pieces from the Texan screenwriter, known for his work on “Dr. Strangelove”, “The Loved One”, “The Collector”, “The Cincinnati Kid”, “Casino Royale”, “Barbarella”, “Easy Rider”, etc. — and something of a cult figure in the Swinging London of the late 1960s, hanging out with all the beautiful people. “The most profoundly witty writer of our generation” (Gore Vidal). First published in the United States in 1967. SOLD |
![]() |
STEIN, Gertrude, 1874-1946 : FERNHURST, Q.E.D., AND OTHER EARLY WRITINGS. New York : Liveright, (1971). First edition. “The three writings issued in this volume — two for the first time and the longer Q.E.D. in a corrected edition — represent the first steps of Gertrude Stein’s literary progress”. “Fernhurst”, begun in 1904, is a fictional account of a scandalous love triangle; the slightly earlier “Q.E.D.” is a suppressed autobiographical novel concerning another love triangle, while the family saga of “The Making of Americans” appears in the form of an unpublished early draft. With a note on the texts by Donald Gallup and a lengthy introduction by Leon Katz. £40 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44991 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
STREATFEILD, Noel (Mary Noel), 1895-1986 : BEYOND THE VICARAGE. London : William Collins Sons & Co., 1971. First edition. The third of the author’s lightly fictionalised autobiographies — covering her career as a writer, her wartime WVS work in Deptford, etc. “She writes as poignantly of a garden or a dog, the illness of a close friend, the virtues and shortcomings of her family, old age and death as she does of war”. SOLD |
![]() |
STOPPARD, Tom (Sir Tomás), 1937- : AFTER MAGRITTE. London : Faber & Faber, (1971). First edition. A review copy, with the publisher’s slip loosely inserted — from the library of fellow playwright John Osborne, with the Hurst Arvon Centre label on the half-title. A surreal farce — “the dialogue operates like a railway junction with a madman switching over the points” (Irving Wardle in The Times). First performed at the Ambiance Lunch-Hour Theatre Club, “with outstanding success”, the previous year, with Prunella Scales and Stephen Moore in the leading parts. SOLD |
![]() |
TAYLOR, Elizabeth, 1912-1975 : MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT. London : Chatto & Windus, 1971. First edition. Widowed and elderly Laura Palfrey takes a taxi through the rain to join the other residents at the Claremont Hotel on the Cromwell Road — but she later tells a lie. Both her funniest and her saddest book, reviewed by Kingsley Amis as a “continuously fascinating novel, always pushing the reader one way and another”. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a television adaptation in 1973 won Celia Johnson a BAFTA Best Actress, and Joan Plowright took on the title role for the 2005 film. SOLD |
![]() |
TAYLOR, Graham — editor : IN DARK MILL SHADOWS : AN ANTHOLOGY OF BAILRIGG POEMS. Bailrigg, Lancaster : Continuum, [1971]. First edition. An anthology which commences pugnaciously with a quotation from Ho Chi Minh — “the poet also should know how to lead an attack”. The opening editorial continues on the theme of dark mills, cramped houses, capitalist exploitation, dark and satanic schools, and even universities — “slave markets for the technocrats” — and “places where humanity is denied, where the potential for love, creativity and joy is suppressed for the sake of profit”. Northern chippiness aside, a very good anthology, with poems from Anne Cluysenaar, Tony Connor, Henry Graham (2), Adrian Henri (2), David Jaffin (2), George Macbeth, Hugh MacDiarmid, Barry MacSweeney, Wes Magee (3), Adrian Mitchell, Pete Morgan (2), Jeff Nuttall, Brian Patten (3), John Pudney (3), Graham Taylor himself (4), and around twenty others. £25 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44963 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
THEROUX, Paul (Paul Edward), 1941- : JUNGLE LOVERS. 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). £150 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45048 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
THOMAS, Dylan (Dylan Marlais), 1914-1953 : THE OUTING. London : J. M. Dent & Sons, (1971). First separate edition. Lyrical recollections of a childhood excursion by charabanc to Porthcawl with his aunt and her husband, “steaming hunk of an uncle, his braces straining like hawsers, crammed behind the counter of the tiny shop at the front of the house, and breathing like a brass band”. SOLD |
![]() |
THOMAS, Keith (Sir Keith Vivian), 1933- : RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, (1971). First edition : the American issue of the British sheets. A feast of sumptuous scholarship on the beliefs in religion, magic, astrology, witchcraft, divination, prophecy, ghosts and fairies, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — “It would be tempting to explain this long survival of magical practices by pointing out that they helped to provide many wizards with a respectable livelihood. The example of the legal profession is a reminder that it is always possible for a substantial social group to support itself by proffering solutions to problems which they themselves have helped to manufacture”. SOLD |
![]() |
“TREVOR, William” — [COX, William Trevor, 1928-2016] : MISS GOMEZ AND THE BRETHREN. London : Bodley Head, (1971). First edition. “A novel about obsession, about a pervading fear of reality, and the fantasies that are invited in their place” (publisher’s blurb) — “William Trevor’s best book yet. Poor Miss Gomez stepped from her Jamaican orphanage to serve behind the counter in Bourne & Hollingsworth, then to the top floor of a Soho brothel” (Victoria Brittain in the Illustrated London News, 1st December 1971). £100 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44940 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
TRYON, Thomas, 1926-1991 : THE OTHER. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. First edition. Inscribed, signed and dated (May 1971) by the author on the front free endpaper. Runaway best-seller success for this first novel from the Hollywood film star — a psychological horror-upon-horror story set in 1930s Connecticut, itself instantly turned into a film. £125 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45045 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
UPDIKE, John (John Hoyer), 1932-2009 : RABBIT REDUX. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. First edition. The sequel to “Rabbit, Run” (1960), set against the background of the Summer of Love — “Ten years have passed; the athletic escapist has become a paunchy conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid confusion of technology, fantasy, and emergency. Rabbit is abandoned and mocked, his home is invaded, the world of his childhood decays into a mere sublunar void; still he clings to semblances of patriotism and paternity”. Acclaimed on first publication — “A rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. A masterpiece” (Time Magazine), “Without doubt, the finest novel John Updike has written” (Julian Symons in the Sunday Times), and acclaimed now, “One of the most gifted American realists ... John Updike’s surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country” (Joyce Carol Oates in 2015). £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44992 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
WEEKS, Donald (Norman Donald), 1921-2003 : CORVO. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed with a friendly greeting and signed with forename by the author in July 1971 — the recipient being Edgar S. Brown of Allentown (PA), whom the author singles out for thanks in his foreword, “for his prevailing urgent and American voice across the Atlantic”. Loosely inserted is the address portion of the packaging used to convey the book from London to Pennsylvania. A full-scale biography of “the myopic, paranoiac near genius” Frederick William Rolfe, “Baron Corvo” (1860-1913) — a biography inspired by, but wholly supplanting, A. J. A. Symons’ “The Quest for Corvo” (1934). £50 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 45005 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
WINTER, Gordon, 1912-1993 : PAST POSITIVE : LONDON’S SOCIAL HISTORY RECORDED IN PHOTOGRAPHS. London : Chatto & Windus, 1971. First edition. An extraordinary assemblage of over 150 photographs of Victorian and Edwardian London — domestic life, rural survivals, Londoners at work and play, shops and markets, transport, public services, and much else besides — “Here are the pieman, the chairmender, the flower-girl, the society hostess; all the throng of the rich and poor going about the serious business of their daily lives”. SOLD |
![]() |
WODEHOUSE, P.G. (Sir Pelham Grenville), 1881-1975 : MUCH OBLIGED, JEEVES. London : Barrie & Jenkins, (1971). First edition. Jeeves, Wooster, Aunt Dahlia, Roderick Spode — and Madeline Bassett once more — the penultimate Jeeves and Wooster novel, published to coincide with the author’s ninetieth birthday — “as fresh and amusing as the best of a series that continues to give pleasure to millions” (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 11th November 1971). SOLD |
![]() |
WOLFE, Tom (Thomas Kennerly), 1931-2018 : RADICAL CHIC & MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS. London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First British edition. Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” in an essay for “New York” magazine in June 1970. It had already struck a chord before the essay (in augmented form) appeared in book form on either side of the Atlantic — “Political extremism is all the rage in these days of radical chic — just as it was when the bored children of the middle class, reacting against their background, helped the radical leftists Mussolini and Hitler into dictatorial power”, noted the Illustrated London News on 31st October 1970. Wolfe’s second essay illuminates in similar vein the San Francisco poverty programmes — “the smell of singed snobbery, roasted radicals and charred chic ascends with blissful delight” (Alexander Walker in the Birmingham Daily Post, 23rd October 1971). £75 To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 44941 – or simply click on the button
|
![]() |
WOUK, Herman, 1915-2019 : THE WINDS OF WAR. London : William Collins Sons & Co., (1971). First British edition. Wouk’s monumental novel of World War II and its impact on three families, one American, one Jewish, and one English — in the estimation of many, the “great” American World War II novel, comparable to “Gone with the Wind” or “All Quiet on the Western Front”. His hero, the stoical Commander Victor “Pug” Henry, initially a naval attaché in Berlin, finds himself in a position to meet not only Hitler, but Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. Himself a navy war veteran, Wouk later wrote that in his novel, “I did my best to shake up the familiar elements in the kaleidoscope of art, to give them an organizing vision and a shape, so that he who runs might read and picture what happened in this worst world catastrophe — the worst, that is, so far”. First published in Boston earlier that year. SOLD |
![]() |
YEVTUSHENKO, Yevgeny (Yevgeny Aleksándrovich), 1933-2017 : STOLEN APPLES : POETRY. New York : Doubleday & Co., 1971. First edition : limited to 250 numbered copies, signed by Yevtushenko. An extensive collection, with authorial introductions and over fifty poems from five collections in both English and Russian texts — the English adaptations by James Dickey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anthony Kahn, Stanley Kunitz, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, and others. SOLD |
Return to Ash Rare Books home page. |
Designed and © 2022 Ash Rare Books
e-mail: books@ashrare.com