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Book description
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| 5641LB |
BALDWIN, James . Three Letters, Signed. 1955-1959. One-page autograph letter, signed, and two typed letters, signed, to Edwin Parone, dated 1955 to 1959. Three pages, octavo, on Howard University letterhead and plain paper; approximately 500 words; unpublished. Director of LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka) riveting off-Broadway play The Dutchman, Parone also worked as an editor at Dell Publishing and as a theatrical agent at the William Morris Agency during the 1950s. Parone was well acquainted with Baldwin and managed over the years to assist the financially embarrased writer by placing his work discreetely in well-paying anthologies. Mentioned in the correspondance is Amen Corner, which Baldwin implored his friend to "hold." "Anyone who wants to read it must read it at your house. Incidentally, Howard U. is presenting it from May 10 to May 19. Want to drop down and look at it with me?" According to Parone, "it was only natural that when Jimmy wrote Amen Corner I should find myself involved -- as a friend, as an agent -- he was a procrastinator and as the time drew dangerously close to rehersal [under playwright Owen Dodson] I literally locked him in his apartment until the work was done." A moving series of letters, with mention of his "awful financial situation" and of his intimate friend Lucien Happersberger, the dedicatee of Giovanni’s Room. Very good
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4,500.00 |
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| 12411LB |
BORGES, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1949. Octavo, 146pp. First edition of Borges's last major collection of ficciones, containing, as well as the epoch-making title story, such subtle marvels as "Emma Zunz," "Deutsches Requium," "La busca de Averroes," "El Zahir" and "El inmortal," among others. Like Beckett, Borges continued to refine his art to a point at which it bore only the most ethereal relationship to traditional narrative, in which the subtlest verbal movement would suffice to convey the great worlds of the earlier work without the obvious benefit of the encumbering structures demanded by literary tradition. There are certainly few stranger or richer stories than "El Aleph," in which the monadological wealth of the bizarre object that gives the work its title is somehow recapitulated in the infinities and the infinitesimal abysses of the narrative itself. One has, reading it, the eerie sense that one has left the plane in which ordinary narrative takes place and entered literally utopian mental and emotional realms for which no compass exists to orient one. Inscribed by Borges in English on the title page. Very good in publisher's illustrated wrappers. A literary artifact of the first water. |
15,000.00 |
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| 8319LB |
BORGES, Jorge Luis. El tamaño de mi esperanza. Buenos Aires: Editorial proa, 1926. Octavo, 151pp. First edition of this early collection of essays. This copy inscribed by Borges on the half title, "A la señorita Concepción Guerrero, con la admiración y el respeto de Georgie". Although already an impossible love, Borges maintains a certain degree of tenderness in the inscription to her first love. Forgotten for almost three quarters of a century, this essays were re-examined by Victor Farías in his 1992 book "El tamaño de mi esperanza, un libro desconocido de Jorge Luis Borges" (Madrid : Anaya & M. Muchnik). A second edition was finaly made in 1993 (Buenos Aires : Seix Barral, 1993) and another more recently (Madrid : Alianza Editorial, 1998). In our copy, Borges has corrected some of the essays profusely: "La pampa y el suburbio son dioses", 7 corrections; "Carriego y el sentido del arrabal", 10 corrections; in "La tierra cárdena", he has replaced the color for "purpúrea" on the title and the three ocurrences in the text; in "La adjetivación", 8 corrections; in "Historia de los ángeles, 1 correction; in "La aventura y el orden", 5 corrections. Many of these corrections penned in by Borges consist an entire sentence that has been rephrased. None of the corrections were included in the 1998 edition, thus rendering this particular book even rarer, as if that were possible. Plus (yes, there is more) this is the first time that Xul Solar collaborated with Borges in a publication, and it is Xul's first incursion in book illustration, in this case by providing five tiny drawings. Borges acknowledges Xul's contributions in the colophon, and also credits the drawing of the title letters to Francisco A. Palomar, a now forgotten cartoonist that was part of the group of collaborators in the magazine Martín Fierro, where in fact Borges met Xul for the first time. Internally near fine with general wear to edges of publisher's printed burgundy wrappers, and an amateurish repair to the bottom left rear corner, where some minor water staining can be still seen. (Becco 51)
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85,000.00 |
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| 9049LB |
BORGES, Jorge Luis. Holograph Manuscript of the Article "La apostasía de Coifi." 1922. Four 14cm x 17.5cm sheets, hand-numbered. Published originally in Entregas de la Licorne. 2a ép., a. 1, n. 1-2.Montevideo, 11/1953, pp45-48. A very little known, yet absolutely fascinating essay about the conversion of the Germanic tribes of Northumbria during the VII century. Thanks to Borges's fascination with early medieval England and the Germanic tribes and his extensive knowledge thereof, he is able to succintly (Borgesly) expound on the importance of this conversion for the history of Europe in just four pages. Yet, paradoxically, Borges argues, there are no accounts of how insignificant this conversion must have been for most of the new Christians. He centers his essay on Coifi, King Edwin's high priest, who according to Bede and others abjured the old religions because it was obvious that their gods didn't protect them against the newcomers. He then proceded to invade his temple on horseback, sword in hand, destroying and then burning it. Borges believes this last act was merely a theatrical embelishment for the benefit of the king. Coifi's character survives as a "subject of bad historical paintings," says Borges, but his fate remains unknown to us, and we don't even know if he stuck by his word and did in fact embrace the new religion. The manuscript has about a dozen minor corrections, and it is written in what we deem to be Borges's smallest handwriting on the smallest leaves he could get his hands on. Interestingly, Borges has inserted two instructions for the printer on the Wordsworth epigraph, something we haven't encountered in other manuscripts. Signed by Borges at the end. |
37,500.00 |
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| 7125LB |
HUIDOBRO, Vicente. Partial Manuscript of the Unpublished Play Entitled España y Anti-España, Accompanied by a Complete Corrected Typescript of the Same Text. 1935 c. Thirty-six holograph pages in three slim buff-colored stapled tall octavo notebooks, containing the first three-quarters of the manuscript of the unpublished play, "Espana y Anti-Espana." The holograph manuscript breaks off in mid-page with the words of General Franco, "Todos los sacerdotes estan con nostros." ("All the priests are on our side.") The manuscript is accompanied by a corrected carbon typescript of forty-four pages, in which the action proceeds to its conclusion -- in which Death awards the Fascist generals the Orden del Buitre Septicefalo (Order of the Seven Headed Vulture) in honour of the magnificent banquet with which they have provided him. At once a political satire and a monumental drama á la Brecht, the protagonists include the three Fascist generals Franco, Millan and Quiepo as well as the spirit of the great Spanish hero, El Cid (to whose ancestry the family of Huidobro's mother can be traced) and Spain herself, portrayed as a "una estatua hieratica." At the age of 43, Huidobro himself, scion of a very wealth Chilean family and long resident of Europe, fought on the side of the Republic against the forces of Franco, until the point at which the dispiriting outcome of the struggle was all but assured. Huidobro is among the great poets of the Spanish language in the Twentieth Century, to our mind, the greatest poet of Latin America. Virtually no manuscript material of his remains in private hands. |
65,000.00 |
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| 7074LB |
MANDELSHTAM, Osip. Autograph Manuscript of the Poem, "Petersburg Stanzas." 1913. Single lined folio sheet removed from a sewn notebook, folded once, written on two rectos. The only known manuscript version of this important early poem by one of the great figures of 20th century verse, first published in the literary miscellany "Giberborei" (Number 5, Feb, 1913) and later included in the poet's first book, Kamen' (Stone) and then in the Collected Poems in 1928. The present text, which is cited in the standard edition, differs from the printed texts in two locations (first stanza, line one and third stanza, line 3). The manuscript bears the date January 1913 at the close. In her memoirs, Lily Brik specifically mentions this poem as one of the works Mayakovsky knew by heart and often spoke. Some soiling and crinkling, as is meet for such an object. Mandelshtam manuscript is among the rarest in the modern era, only about twenty poems being known to survive in holograph. It is a well-known fact that had it not been for the memory of Mandelshtam's wife Nadezhda, who had memorized them, many of his poems would have been lost. |
85,000.00 |
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| 9181LB |
(MILLER, Henry.) MAILER, Norman. Typed Letter, Signed. n.p.: 1976. Four 8 1/2" x 11" page typed letter, signed, addressed by Norman Mailer to Henry Miller, regarding comments Mailer had made about Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Collossus of Maroussi, in which Mailer explains his criticisms, his approach to criticism in general, his enormous admiration for Miller and the nature of the divergence in their thinking and methods -- largely, in effect, an apology. A very affecting, honest and revealing literary document. Toward the close, Mailer speaks of a French colleague whose experience with writing is tortured (Mailer describes him as "one of the most constipated writers in Christedom"). This Jean Malaquais, a close friend of Mailer's, when asked why he bothers to write when he could do so many other gratifying things so much less painlessly, replied (with surprise), "why, that's the only way to find out the truth." Of course, Mailer brought forth the anecdote to subscribe to its conclusion, but then who wouldn't, and what errors of fact or judgment does it not make great strides toward absolving. A superb letter form one of the great writers of our time to one of the great writers of his time. Near fine. |
4,500.00 |
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| 5636LB |
TRAKL, Georg. Gedichte. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1913. Octavo, 65pp. First edition of Trakl's first book, the only one published during his tragically brief lifetime. The author's own copy, in which he has revised the poem, "Traum des Boesen," including the rewritting of a full stanza. With Trakl's woodcut bookplate. Laid in is an evocative three-page letter written on behalf of the poet in June 1913 from Erhard Buschbecks to Franz Zeiss, to whom Trakl would give the present offering, requesting that he assist in finding the poet lodging in Vienna. An early Expressionist whose haunting, disjointed and altogether dispassionatre verse is among the most singular in our century, Trakl, by necessity, has been more admired than emulated. His is a labor of profound patience, a patience that awaits the voice of things themselves. "The poems have a magnificent silence in them, the silence of things that could speak but choose not to." Rilke said of Trakl, "His poetry is to me an object of sublime existence...It occurs to me that his whole work has a parrallel in the aspiration of a Li Po: in both, falling is the pretext for the most continuous ascension. In the history of the poem, Trakl's books are important contributions to the liberation of the poetic image. They seem to me to have mapped out new dimensions of the spirit, and to have disproved that prejudice which judges all poetry in terms of feeling and content only, as if in the direction of lament there were only lament -- but here too there is world again." Wittgenstein, who secretly subsidized the poet, said of his work, "It has the sound of poetry." The present volume is an early publication in the renowned series of Expressionist literature, Der juengste Tag. There are three known presentation copies of this title (there are only eleven presentation copies of anything by Trakl, most of which are offprints of poems published in Ficker's Der Brenner) but none can claim the distinction of the present copy, which is registered in the Historical-Critical Edition of Trakl's Works (volume 2, p. 73). An excellent copy of the rare bound issue of a title ususally found in the issue in printed wrappers. |
75,000.00 |
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