AUDEN, W.H.

London: Faber, 1937

8vo, pp. 12. Original red stiff paper wrappers with foldover flaps. Partly unopened.

First edition. English literary scholar Nevill Coghill's... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

HILL, Susan

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983

8vo, pp. 160. Original green boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated dustwrapper.

First edition of what has now become better known in its second incarnation. The stage adaptation of The Woman In Black is a West End phenomenon, and has been running in London since 1989. Like the book, it is genuinely creepy.

Scarce, and getting scarcer.

[ed. WAYNFLETE, John] BENTLEY, Nicolas; LAMBERT, Constant; SADLEIR, Michael, and others

Cambridge: Rampant Lions Press, 1938

Oblong 12mo, unpaginated. Original black stiff paper wrappers, lettered in pale blue to front panel. Paper stock of different colours.

First edition. CHARLES HANDLEY-READ'S COPY WITH HIS OWNERSHIP SIGNATURE TO FRONT FREE ENDPAPER.

A collection of twenty-six clerihews, with blank pages bound in at the rear for the reader's own additions. On the page headed 'THE AUTHORS' the last line of text is missing, thereby omitting the name of the author of The Emperor Pertinax.

Charles Handley-Read [1916-1971] was a writer on architecture and a collector in the field of Victorian decorative arts. He read architecture at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, and would have been an undergraduate when he bought this volume (which was published in Cambridge) on 28 October 1938.

A second edition was published in 1946 and surfaces occasionally, but the first, offered here, is extremely scarce -- especially with such a provenance.

HEANEY, Seamus

London: Faber, 1972

8vo, pp. 56. Original stiff paper wrappers.

First paperback edition of Heaney's second commercially published collection, first published in... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

LARKIN, Philip

London: Faber, 1964

8vo, pp. 46. Original deep red cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Dustwrapper.

First edition. Published in February 1964 in an edition of ... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

[trans. RIGNAUT, Homer] SAINE, Uc

Paris: Edward Titus, 1929

8vo, pp. 16. Original plain stiff paper wrappers, housed in a dustwrapper printed in red and black to front panel. Top edge cut, others uncut. Small ... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

New York: Viking Press, 1961

8vo, pp. 132. Original beige boards, lettered in red on spine.

First edition of Miller's novelisation of his own screenplay. The film... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

[ARAGON, Louis] ANONYMOUS

Paris: Chez L'Auteur [Jean-Jacques Pauvert], 1952

8vo, pp. 108. Variant binding: blue stiff paper wrappers, white title label on front panel. Fifth (blank) leaf missing, as in all copies. French text.

Second... [more]

SARRAUTE, Nathalie

London: John Calder, 1963

8vo, pp. 136. Original grey boards, lettered in gilt on spine.

First UK edition, inscribed by Sarraute on the half-title: 'A David Gothard, en souvenir très amical. Nathalie Sarraute.'... [more]

REID, Forrest

London: Edward Arnold, 1912

8vo, pp. 320. Original brown boards, lettered in black to front panel and spine. Lower edge uncut.

First edition.

A coming-of-age novel from an Ulster novelist at the beginning of the twentieth century is always going to invite comparisons with Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and comparisons are always made, but Reid is more than able to stand on his own two feet, not only because of the calibre of his writing, but because of the homosexual sensibility which permeates his work, never explicit but always there. This book is no exception. Reid was the bridge between the ornate crypticism of the Uranians and the beginning of the genre we now know as Gay Lit. He's both important and scarce -- which is why this less than beautiful copy is offered.