Rare Books Blog
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
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 to writing and activism, and she was an intellectual leader for such movements as birth control, immigration reform, women’s physical fitness, and even euthanasia. “In her time,” critics have written, “she was certainly the leading intellectual of the woman’s movement in the United States.” This book reproduces classic paintings which …
Posted on February 26, 2010 at 11:34 pm
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
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 information among them – but is today most famous for Franklin’s proverbs and aphorisms, such as “He who lives upon hope will die fasting.”
This collectible volume, produced by the Limited Editions Club in 1964, weds Franklin’s earthy, homespun wisdom with the splendidly colorful and organized compositions of Norman Rockwell. …
Posted on November 13, 2009 at 11:37 pm
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
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 set of nine volumes kept in three bright clipcases also includes “Bluebeard,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Saint George and the Dragon,” “Dick Whittington and His Cat,” “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” Each is exquisitely illustrated and signed by Jean Hersholt, Edy Legrand, …
Posted on November 6, 2009 at 11:43 pm
-
Banned Book Week 2009!
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 books were Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy (for political viewpoints, religious viewpoints, and violence), The Kite Runner (offensive language, sexually explicit material, and for being unsuited to age group), and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding (you guessed it, homosexuality and unsuited to age group). But these books merely join a vast and …
Posted on October 2, 2009 at 10:04 pm
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
“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 objector, poet Louis Sacchetti is transferred to an underground military compound, Camp Archimedes. Here, in the “camp concentration” of the title, he and the other inmates are fed a drug that increases their IQs to genius levels, while slowly killing them. Sacchetti’s written records of day-to-day life inside Archimedes …
Posted on September 18, 2009 at 9:59 pm
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
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, and it presages all the traits for which the iconic illustrator is known: the dark satire, the musty Victorian set-pieces, and the brooding dark-clad (and invariably hard-luck) artists. This lovely First Edition has dozens of illustrations and a superbly preserved dust-jacket—a great book for any Gorey admirer (such as Mr …
Posted on September 11, 2009 at 10:19 pm
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
“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 about the morality of the sportsman: “The true sportsman is never wanton in slaughter. If he is worthy the name, he will feel infinitely more satisfaction in a single successful shot which comes to crown the triumph of his hardihood…than he would in any amount of shooting at creatures driven …
Posted on August 8, 2009 at 12:14 am
-
Rare Book Feature of the Week!
“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, without theory or method.” The bright, swirling beauty of Chagall’s work have been captured in this 1966 book dedicated to the ceiling. It most strikingly contains an original color lithograph frontispiece and a fold-out detail of the final study of the ceiling laid in to a sleeve in the rear …
Posted on August 1, 2009 at 1:10 am
Donate Today
Join our healing community by becoming a member today
