Rare Books Blog
Rare Books
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Here is a true rarity: the first book by fiction writer and women’s movement icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Herland”, married the artist Charles Walter Stetson in 1884 but suffered from post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter Katherine. She separated from Stetson in 1888 (the year this book was published) to move back to California, and the two eventually divorced in 1894. Gilman then devoted her life…
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This wonderful illustration of colonial Philadelphia is just one of Norman Rockell’s additions to Benjamin Franklin’s legendary Poor Richard Almanack. Franklin began publishing his almanack in 1732, and it was so wildly popular (eventually selling over 10,000 copies) that he put out new editions for 25 years. Even Napoleon Bonaparte was a fan, and had it translated into Italian (the French was already immensely popular). The Almanack contained many things – poems, meteorological and astronomical…
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The Evergreen Tales or Tales from the Ageless The stories we learn as children leave indelible impressions on us – as much for their continuous resurfacing in popular culture and metaphor as for the warm memories their words conjure up. If you grew up with fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Ugly Duckling,” you’ll find this exquisite collection of nine illustrated stories in three folios truly irresistible. The full…
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Housing Works is proud to celebrate Banned Books week, and doubly proud to make available to readers all those books that have faced censorship in one form or another. It’s a startling fact that between 2001 and 2008, American Libraries have been faced with 3,736 challenges. The challenges have been based on “sexually explicit” material, “offensive language,” “homosexuality,” “religious viewpoints,” or that curious catch-all “anti-family” material. In 2008, some of the top ten most challenged…
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“It is a work of art, and if you read it, you will be changed.” No small praise for any book, but when the book in question is science fiction and the source of the praise is Ursula K. LeGuin, readers are likely to sit up and take note. In Camp Concentration, Thomas M. Disch describes an America of the future at war in southeast Asia. Three months after his imprisonment for being a conscientious…
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Everyone of course knows of the novelist Mr Clavius Frederick Earbrass. His Hipdeep Trilogy (Dustbin, More Chains Than Clank, Was it Likely?) certainly comprise his best-loved work. Now he is working on his new opus, The Unstrung Harp, and his faithful biographer Edward Gorey is there to document (and, naturally, illustrate!) the joys and travails of composition. The Unstrung Harp may be a late work of Mr Earbrass, but it is Gorey’s first independent work,…
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“This volume is meant for the lover of the wild, free, lonely life of the wilderness, and of the hardy pasttimes known to the sojourners therein.” So goes Theodore Roosevelt’s foreward to The Deer Family, his typically boisterous collection of essays about the deer and antelope of North America. Along with his observations of the animals under study, Roosevelt engages in the spiralling digressions for which is prose is so well-known, such as these remarks…
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“Two years ago Andre Malraux asked me to paint a new ceiling for the Paris Opera. I was troubled touched and moved.” So spoke Marc Chagall at the inaguration of this work in 1964. He went on to say, “I wished to reflect, as though in a mirror high above, in a bouquet of dreams, the creation of actors, of composers, to recall the colorful movements of the audience below. To sing like a bird,…
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Here is Washington Irving’s timeless tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman in an edition that features illustrations nearly as immortal as the story itself. These are of course Arthur Rackham’s, the great British book illustrator who has provided the iconic images of so many fairy and folk tales. This edition, from 1928, contains a color frontispiece and 7 more beautiful color plates of the haunting tableau of Irving’s classic. The book also has…
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