Browse Items (131 total)

In June of 1990 I received a phone call from Judy Lowry of the Argosy Book Store and the auction house Swann. It was to alert me to an important Jewish fable book coming up at auction, this edition of Meshal ha-Kadmoni (The Fable of the Ancient.) It…

This preliminary version of the Nakaz (or Instruction) is interleaved with manuscript contemporary notes, possibly by a delegate to the Assembly that Catherine II convened in 1767 to discuss her draft law code. It is in a sumptuous full red morocco…

I discovered that a critical source for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) was the novel The Salem Belle (1842)—and I also found, through archival work, that the author of this latter book was Ebenezer Wheelwright. I discussed…

Pen and ink and watercolor, 16 x 12 in.

Though she’s never heard of me or of my collection on women in the American wilderness, no one but Roz Chast could better capture the agonies and joys of foraging through book stores far and wide for un-…

Provenance: Margaret Keynes; presentation inscription from Charles Darwin’s wife, Emma, to their son Leonard.

In the words of Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, this book needed “a very good home.” Gaskell was close to the…

The American writer Dawn Powell wrote sixteen novels, of which Whither was her first. However, following its publication, she disowned it, and went around to bookstores and bought up all the copies she could find. Thus, she always called her second…

Binding by David Chivers of Bath.

Provenance: Mrs. William Vernon Harcourt, wife of the chancellor of the exchequer under Prime Minister William Gladstone.

The first edition of What Shall We Have for Dinner? appeared in 1851, although no…

George Cruikshank designed, etched and published this album of thirty-six hand-colored caricatures of daily life during the period 1833–36 and sold them through the London bookseller and publisher Charles Tilt. These copper etchings were issued in…

Edition of 236. I'm captivated by fine and private press materials and their intersection of artistry, social and historical forces, and economic principles (sometimes disregarded). Viewed as less constrained by the pressures of commercialism, these…

Written by the thirteenth-century Welsh Franciscan John of Wales, the work from which this leaf comes was meant to provide priests with basic information on how to lead a good life. Thus in sermons and conversation, they could instruct individuals…