A very good copy; jacket with minor rubbing and creasing, price-clipped, but overall very good.
Jacket design by Michael Ayrton.
£325
London, Secker & Warburg, 1958.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Largely autobiographical, Peyrefitte’s famous work on adolescence deals with an intimate relationship between two boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school and how it is destroyed by a priest’s will to protect them from homosexuality. An uncommon title, in attractive Ayrton jacket.
In stock
A very good copy; jacket with minor rubbing and creasing, price-clipped, but overall very good.
Jacket design by Michael Ayrton.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Orbit/Macdonald, 1990.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
An attractive first edition of the third in Banks' 'Culture' series, the first draft of which was written in 1974, preceding the author's debut novel The Wasp Factory by a decade.
American Literature
A short history
New York [London], Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.
First UK edition, on US sheets. 8vo. Original cloth-backed patterned boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s6d.
A satirical overview of American history from "discovery" to the present, featuring explanatory diagrams and caricatures by the author. The book did not sell well, seemingly a contributing factor to the author & illustrator's suicide in 1931.
Modern Literature
London, Secker & Warburg, 1959.
First edition. 8vo. Original burgundy boards. Dust-jacket, priced 18s.
A very good first edition of the author's first book, set against a backdrop of redbrick academia.
Non-Fiction
London, Secker & Warburg, 1939.
First UK edition. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.
Signed with the author's compliments to front free endpaper. A perceptive study of the historical, cultural, and political roots of German antisemitism. German-born Jewish economist and writer F.R. Bienenfeld traces the long evolution of anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany and the forces that enabled its transformation into state policy under National Socialism. After fleeing to England in 1939, he worked with the World Jewish Congress, helped draft German reparations claims following the Second World War, and later contributed to the legal preparations for the Nuremberg Trials.
Sexuality & Erotica
Translated from the Japanese by Alfred H. Marks
London, Secker & Warburg, 1968.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Mishima's groundbreaking novel, Forbidden Colours (original Kinjiki, 1951), explores same-sex love, aesthetic obsession, misogyny and social constraints in post-war Tokyo, the title being a euphemism for erotic, forbidden love and colours once restricted by Japanese court rank.