Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The novel centres on Joseph Mbagawa, an East African student and chief's son with artistic leanings, living in a London hostel with other African students; chafing against its insularity, and against the aggressive race-consciousness of his influential friend Aiyedumni, he moves to a boarding house, setting himself at the intersection of two worlds.
Modern Literature
An autobiography
New York, Modern Age Books, 1940.
First US edition, first printing. Signed & dated by the author on half-title. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Uncommon in the jacket, let alone signed. The author has signed 'Haru Matsui' in English and Japanese, written in hiragana (for the given name Haru) and kanji (for the surname Matsui, 松井).
Ayako Ishigaki (1903–1996) was an Issei journalist, activist, and feminist, born Tanaka Ayako in Tokyo, the daughter of a college professor; she first came to the United States in 1926, moved to New York, and married the painter Eitaro Ishigaki in 1931; she adopted the pseudonym Haru Matsui to protect her family in Japan from possible retaliation for her left-wing activism. Restless Wave is a semi-autobiographical memoir detailing Ishigaki's coming of age in a privileged Japanese family, her rebellion against strict codes of women's behaviour, her political awakening, and her immigration to the United States; her critiques of Japanese society and militarism brought negative attention from the Japanese government, while the book was widely praised in the US.
Modern Literature
London, Macmillan, 1925.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green blind-tooled cloth after design by Charles Ricketts, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket repeating the Ricketts design, priced 10/6.
Gathering Yeats' early poetry and prose fiction, including the Celtic Twilight material, 'The Secret Rose', and the Stories of Red Hanrahan, as well as the lyrics of his first period.
Modern Literature
London, Macmillan, 1923.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green blind-tooled cloth after design by Charles Ricketts, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket repeating the Ricketts design, priced 10/6.
Gathering Yeats' major prose writings on the Irish dramatic movement alongside six plays including 'The Countess Cathleen', 'The Land of Heart's Desire', and the Four Plays for Dancers ('At the Hawk's Well', 'The Only Jealousy of Emer', 'The Dreaming of the Bones', and 'Calvary').
Modern Literature
London, John Murray, 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The debut novel of the author of On the Night of the Fire (1939). He remains chiefly remembered for Odd Man Out (1945), which spawned a film adaptation in 1947 directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason.
Modern Literature
London, Constable, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Rural novel set in the village of Thornhill, dominated by the violent farmer-squire George Raker. The land itself is the true tyrant - binding all the characters, including Raker's wife, Esther Marlowe, James Baxter, and a labourer called Shandy, through possession or toil to its impersonal seasonal rhythms.
Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The novel centres on Joseph Mbagawa, an East African student and chief's son with artistic leanings, living in a London hostel with other African students; chafing against its insularity, and against the aggressive race-consciousness of his influential friend Aiyedumni, he moves to a boarding house, setting himself at the intersection of two worlds.
Modern Literature
Mishima (Yukio, pseud. Kimitake Hiraoka) Confessions of a Mask
translated by Meredith Weatherby
London, Peter Owen, 1960.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Mishima's second novel, exploring themes of sexuality, societal pressure, and body image, surrounding the life of a young homosexual man named Kochan who struggles with his sexuality and finding his place in Japanese society. The novel achieved Mishima national fame despite his young age.
Modern Literature
A tale of an island
London, George Allen & Unwin, 1927.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Constance Antonina "Nina" Boyle (1865-1943) was a militant suffragette (a leader of the Women's Freedom League, imprisoned three times), a journalist, a pioneer of women police (she co-founded the Women Police Volunteers with Margaret Damer Dawson in 1914), and, most strikingly, the first woman to attempt to stand for election to the UK Parliament, submitting a nomination at the 1918 Keighley by-election and so opening the way for women candidates. A contemporary Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted the feminism The Rights of Mallaroche carried over from her suffragette days (she had by the 1920s moved politically rightward).
Modern Literature
London, Secker & Warburg, 1956.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), one of the towering figures of modern Japanese literature, first published Tade kuu mushi in serial form in 1928–29; widely regarded as his most autobiographical novel and among his finest.
Modern Literature
Jackson (Neville, pseud. Gerald Marcus Glaskin) No End to the Way
London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1965.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A novel chronicling a homosexual relationship, published under the pseudonym Neville Jackson by Gerald Marcus Glaskin (1923–2000), a Perth-born Australian author; it is recognised as the first overtly gay Australian novel, and was banned in Australia for over a year after publication despite remaining in print in Britain for twenty years.
Modern Literature
London, Andre Deutsch, 1965.
First edition. 8vo. Original brown boards. Dust-jacket, priced 21s.
The first of only three novels by the Nigerian playwright, novelist and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, set in the 1960s, in post-independence and pre-civil war Nigeria, mainly in Lagos. Professor Soyinka recently celebrated his 90th birthday and a host of events were staged around the world to commemorate the occasion including the release of two documentaries and a feature film centred around his work and life.
Modern Literature
London, Selwyn & Blount, 1926.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A relatively obscure title, seemingly involving a love triangle in bohemian London.
Modern Literature
New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1923.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.00.
Constance Antonina (Nina) Boyle (1865–1943) was a British journalist, campaigner for women's suffrage and women's rights, welfare worker, and novelist, and one of the pioneers of female police officers in Britain. In April 1918, she was the first woman to submit a nomination to stand for election to the House of Commons. Apart from her journalism and campaigning, Boyle wrote mostly adventure or mystery novels featuring strong, capable women characters.
Modern Literature
London, Calder & Boyars, 1966.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The author's first novel, examining the strength of a marriage in modern times.
Modern Literature
London, Jonathan Cape, 1958.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth. Dust-jacket.
A novel dealing with the growing estrangement of a well-to-do married couple and the means by which harmony is restored, lauded by Philip Larkin as the subtlest of all Pym's books. Larkin sparked a resurgence of interest in this author when he named her one of the twentieth century's most underrated authors in a 1977 Times Literary Supplement survey.
Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, [1920].
Fifth edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.
The story of a woman who, while travelling through the Cornish countryside, discovers the journal of a couple who, unable to marry, remained devoted to one another. Gertrude Eliza Page (1872-1922) was an Anglo-Rhodesian novelist, best known for Paddy the Next Best Thing (1908), which was adapted as a British silent film in 1923.
Modern Literature
London, Jonathan Cape, 1970.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original blue boards. Dust-jacket.
A very nice first UK edition of this famous multi-generational story by Colombian writer and Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, published three years after the South American edition.
Modern Literature
London, Rex Collings, 1972.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original brown cloth. Dust-jacket, priced £3.50.
An epic tale of a group of rabbits seeking a new home, exploring themes of survival and freedom, far removed from the more soporific tales of Beatrix Potter.
(and other incidents)
London, Hutchinson, [1935].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6. With loosely inserted promotional flyer.
A collection of short stories by the brother of journalist Sir Philip Gibbs and novelist Arthur Hamilton Gibbs, often with a focus on relationships and romance. Excellent jacket artwork by Hawes.
Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1938.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
An uncommon title in the Youngman Carter jacket, especially signed by the author, a writer whose fiction engages with questions of human consciousness and illusion, apparently.
Modern Literature
Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir
London, Martin Secker, 1930.
First edition in English. 8vo.. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.
This stands as the first English translation of any of Kafka's works, appearing some seven years before English editions of either The Trial or The Metamorphosis, which makes it considerably the rarer book.
The Castle was first published in German in 1926. It is the longest and last of Franz Kafka's novels (1883-1924), begun in the final two years of his life and left unfinished at his death. The novel works a quiet transformation on the medieval grail narrative, substituting the quest for the grail with its protagonist's dreamlike struggle against a remote and impenetrable bureaucracy - the kind Kafka had encountered at first hand in the unsettled years following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. What Kafka intended the novel to mean has never been satisfactorily resolved; this first English edition inclines toward the text's religious symbolism, with the repeated and frustrated attempts to reach the castle read by some critics as an allegory of the search for salvation, rather than emphasising the partially autobiographical strand that led Kafka to begin the book in the first person.
The translation is made from the first German edition, incorporating the posthumous revisions of Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod, who prepared the manuscript for publication.
The book was banned in Germany between 1933 and 1945 under the National Socialist regime.
Modern Literature
and The Extraction of Confession
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1951.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A descriptive study of the Russian purges of 1936–39 drawn from numerous personal experiences by a Soviet historian and a German scientist writing under pseudonyms, outlining the anatomy of the purge process including methods of selecting victims, securing denunciations, fabricating charges, and extracting confessions. The authors were Fritz Houtermans, a German physicist who had fled to the USSR and been imprisoned by the NKVD, and Konstantin Shteppa, a Kiev University historian who had been Houtermans's cellmate; they used pseudonyms to protect their friends and colleagues still in the USSR.
"Horne worked as a foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1952 to 1955, stationed in Berlin. In 1953, he was recruited by MI6 and used his job as a journalist as a cover for his spying. He left the world of espionage for history when he was sacked from the Telegraph in 1955, allegedly for offending the wife of the chairman of the newspaper". (Wikipedia)
New York, George H. Doran, 1927.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced $2.
Concordia Merrel (1885–1962) was a British stage and silent film actress, photographer's model, and prolific author of romantic fiction.
Modern Literature
London, Ward, Lock, 1936.
First edition, first impression. Signed & dated by the author on title-page. 8vo. Original cloth.
An early work by the Poldark author, signed and dated 1939.
Modern Literature
A Comedy in Three Acts
London, Chatto & Windus, 1926.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original stiff card printed wrappers.
Awarded the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this comedy was the basis for Frank Loesser's acclaimed Broadway musical The Most Happy Fella (1957). Howard also wrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind (1939).
Modern Literature
A play in three acts
London, Heinemann, 1934.
First edition. 8vo. Original boards, printed spine label. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
Set in pre-First World War Europe, the play tells the story of two brothers who are composers, sharing a flat and in love with two women; the original West End run starred Elisabeth Bergner, for whom the play was written.
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, [1939].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Maugham's most political novel, written just before the outbreak of World War II. In 1944 it was adapted into an American film directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, often classified as a film noir.
Modern Literature
London, Hogarth Press, 1950.
First edition, second impression. 8vo. Original green cloth. Dust-jacket, correctly priced 8/6 and stating 'second impression'.
An attractive second impression of this work by Guyanese author Mittelhölzer, particularly notable in the context of Caribbean literature. The author sadly killed himself in 1965, at the age of 55. An important book.
Modern Literature
London, Sampson Low, Marston, [1931].
First edition, early impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
Book and wrapper are both early issues based on titles listed on half-title. A story of the films and of the stunt girl whose life is full of thrilling adventures, told in Mr. Starr's entertaining manner.
Modern Literature
London, Faber & Faber, 1989.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author on title-page. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The story of an English butler who reflects on his years of service and a past relationship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize in 1989 and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Modern Literature
London, Secker & Warburg, 1973.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The author's second satirical novel, warmly inscribed by him to Peter Giddy, referencing the latter's "Dornford Yates club".
Modern Literature
London, Jonathan Cape, 1975.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Amis's second novel, more controversial and less immediately celebrated than his debut. It was reissued in 1984 under the title Dark Secrets.
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1944.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A quiet, understated wartime love story set on an RAF bomber station in England.
Modern Literature
London, Faber & Faber, 1959.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
An uncommon first edition, notably striking for its Ardizzone jacket.
Modern Literature
London, Longmans, Green, 1958.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A mystery novel set in Kenya during the Mau Mau period, in which a young woman becomes entangled in murder. The novel was published under the pseudonym Mollie Hamilton in the US.
Modern Literature
London, Duckworth, 1931.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Contemporary half calf on marbled boards.
A novel of dissipated young London life in the early 1930s - parties, meaningless relationships, and a backdrop of social futility, seen through the eyes of Atwater, a minor museum official.
Modern Literature
London, Sampson Low, Marston, [1945].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A gentle, character-driven novel of English provincial life in wartime, in the tradition of E.M. Delafield and E.H. Young.
Modern Literature
and other stories
London, Arthur Bonde, [1947].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A short story collection by Nigel Morland (born Carl Van Biene) was a British author of many detective and other novels. He also worked as a personal assistant to Edgar Wallace and was a co-founder of the Crime Writers' Association.
Modern Literature
London, Gollancz, 1987.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The author's first novel, based on his experiences as an English teacher in Tokyo.
Modern Literature
London, Jonathan Cape, 1969.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Gysin was a painter and composer who collaborated with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs on many occasions. The Process was his first full-length novel.
Modern Literature
London, Phoenix House, 1950.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A novel about a man who has returned to the coal seams of Durham after a period spent away seeking education. The novel provided the inspiration for Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow's musical Close the Coalhouse Door.