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Anderson, Sherwood
WINESBURG, OHIO
VG/VG. (NY: Modern Library, 1947). 303 pages, plus list of "Modern Library Giants" on final two pages.
211 pages.
~~~ To Sherwood Anderson, more than any other American writer, belongs the distinction of having converted mere sectional writing into a universal experience. As the interpreter of mid-western life, he wrought a change in mood and method that was revolutionary. His masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, became the forerunner of a new and vital school of contemporary writing. Its glowing humanity, its inescapable conviction of truth and its brooding, tender insight make it a book by which Anderson has earned a leading rank among the important novelists of America and certainly among the best of our storytellers.
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Bain, Robert (ed),
WHITMAN'S AND DICKINSON'S CONTEMPORIES: An Anthology of Their Verse.
NEW copy, TRADE PAPERBACK. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 504 pages. "Bain's edition attempts to reconstruct the American poetic landscape during the age of Whitman and Dickinson. He anthologizes the work of a variety of poets, including John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among a wide range of other writers. Bain contextualizes their work within the historical framework of the mid to latter half of the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis upon such events as the Civil War and the Mexican War in the late 1840s."
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[Burroughs] Edward Kanze,
THE WORLD OF JOHN BURROUGHS.
NEW copy, hardcover. Abrahms, 1993. 160 pages.
"John Burroughs - naturalist, ornithologist, author, poet, and teacher - is perhaps best remembered today as one of the earliest and most articulate pioneers of what is now known as the conservation movement in the United States. Burroughs published twenty-eight books between 1867 and 1922, writing about literature as well as nature, and earning a popularity in his time as great as that of his contemporaries and kindred spirits, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Many of his writings are still in print. Born in 1837 in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and a longtime resident of the Hudson River Valley, Burroughs spent his life studying the natural world around him - from birds and bees to flowers and trees - and putting his thoughts on paper. His powerful verbal landscapes and philosophical insights into the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution were read by hundreds of thousands of people - from powerful industrialists to countless schoolchildren. He counted among his friends the poet Walt Whitman, the pioneering preservation President, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie. Henry Ford, whose own farmland upbringing Burroughs's writing recalled, not only gave the writer a Model T car and went camping with him, but also purchased his boyhood homestead, which Burroughs and other relatives were having trouble maintaining, and deeded it to his friend. Author Ed Kanze, himself a naturalist, writer, and photographer, sheds new light on Burroughs's enormous contribution to how we think about our environment. His biographical text is enhanced by many quotations from Burroughs's essays and poems and, uniquely, by conversations with Burroughs's granddaughter, who contributed numerous affectionate recollections of her grandfather as well as many archival photographs of him, his farm and woodland writing studio, 'Slabsides,' and family and friends - including Muir, Roosevelt, Ford, Edison, and others." Originally published at $29.95, now OUT OF PRINT.
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Cooper, James Fenimore,
GLEANINGS IN EUROPE: ITALY. NEW copy. TRADE PAPERBACK. SUNY, 1981. 377 pages.
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Cooper, James Fenimore
THE PRAIRIE. NEW copy. TRADE PAPERBACK. Oxford University Press, 1999. 393 pages.
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Cooper, James Fenimore,
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: SEA TALES, THE PILOT, THE RED ROVER.
Library of America, 1991. NEW copy, Hardcover with dust jacket. 902 pages.
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Cooper, James Fenimore
WORKS. Complete in 32 volumes. Half leather. (NY: Hurd & Houghton: Cambridge
Riverside Press, 1872). Illustrated from drawings by F.O.C. Darley. Volumes generally in excellent condition. Damage to particular volumes will be noted, and photos provided. Inquiries welcome. (Click on photo to enlarge.)
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Guthrie, James R,
EMILY DICKINSON'S VISION: Illness and Identity in her Poetry
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (University Press of Florida, 1998).
211 pages.
~~~ In this original contribution to Dickinson biography and criticism, James Guthrie demonstrates how the poet's optical disease--strabismus, a deviation of the cornea--directly affected her subject matter, her poetic method, and indeed her sense of her own identity.
Dickinson's illness compelled her to remain indoors with her eyes heavily bandaged for months at a time, especially during the summer. Guthrie maintains that these extended periods of sensory deprivation caused her to seek solace in writing and to convert her poems into replacements for her injured eyes. Many poems discuss her physical pain; many mention such topics as optics, astronomy, light, or the sun; some suggest that she blamed God for what had happened to her. These poems permitted her, Guthrie says, to use her personal experience as a springboard for discussing philosophical and religious matters and led her, finally, to conceive a system of metapoetics in which she served as translator or mediator between God's will and human experience.
Guthrie argues that reading the poems in an overtly biographical context deepens their complexity and profundity. Dickinson emerges from this study as an accomplished artist and an eminently sane and stable woman whose patience and optimism were sorely tested by severe, chronic illness.
~~~ Currently in print at $59.95.
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Worral, Simon,
THE POET AND THE MURDERER
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK.
(Plume Books). 270 pages.
~~~ She was a private woman who became a poet in order to reveal the
truth about herself. He was a master of deception and a murderer whose greatest
creation was his own shadowy persona. Simon Worrall takes readers on a
spellbinding journey into the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Hofmann, and
the great literary forgery that links them together.
As the author follows the trail of a forged Emily Dickinson poem across America, he journeys into a labyrinth of lies and intrigue where truth is illusion, and nothing is what it seems. Filled with the page-turning suspense and tantalizing sleuthing techniques of a literary thriller, The Poet and the Murderer paints us an unforgettable portrait of a man whose greatest talent - and greatest tragedy - was his ability to conceal his depraved brilliance behind the unique gifts and enduring celebrity of others." His greatest forgery, a fifteen-line poem in the style of Emily Dickinson, dazzled and then shocked the world of auction houses and academia. By weaving together the story of this masterful forgery with fascinating insights into the life and work of America's most elusive poet, Simon Worrall has created a book that explores the edge between art and artifice, and genius and madness.
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De Courcey, Virginia,
VERNAL EQUINOX
.
~~~
NEW copy, stiff wraps. (Morgantown, WV: Monongahela Books, 2007), illustrations, 29 pp.
~~~ Contents: 'Penelope'; 'Leavetaking'; 'Vernal Equinox';
'Rainy Hyades'; 'Gravetime'; 'Pilgrim'; 'Anchor';
'Passion's Possibility'.
~~~ Vernal Equinox is a an intensely lyrical
cycle of seven poems written in the author's twenty-ninth year.
They are unlike anything in contemporary poetry, and reveal
a remarkable depth and breadth of learning in literature,
philosophy and the classics. But these are less meditations
of intellect and erudtion, than songs of the unconscious,
drawing their imagery
from ancient mediterranean wells, from Egyptian, Hebrew and
Greek traditions.
~~~ Virginia De Courcy's first publication was an
epistemological study on the nature of learning written when
she was sixteen. In the same year she wrote a regular
editorial column for the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph.
She graduated with honors from Rockford College with
a double major in classical studies and philosophy.
Subsequently she studied the conservation
of rare books and manuscripts at the University of Chicago
and journalism at the University of Minnesota.
She died tragically in 1986 at the age of thirty-six. This
book is the first published appearance of her poetry.
from "Rainy Hyades":
When I found spring in a thicket, in a world grown old,
she wore a golden embroidered cap
like Persephone’s, close-fitting as skin,
to hide the secret hair of her autumn:
such was Hyades rising in the enigma of rain,
as the halo wound about the sun
on yearning days ~~
its passion remembered:
a golden claw that accompanies
the face of the sphynx.
I loved the body,
its rainy coolness against black deeps
like a violet wild on a far tundra ~~
to nourish beyond the short span of the moon,
creating unnatural lines of grace
among thawing streams where black carp drift
before the divining tree.
from "Pilgrim":
As a swift horseman on urgent journey
through a bleak roumania of foothills and snow,
(no familiar roof toward evening),
I entered the dark unknown of a wood
and there discovered, in a small clearing,
a holy burial ground of stakes
and crucifixes, fresh-driven.
The saints all hung there, flayed and torn,
noble prey like lion or stag,
in the art of medieval venery ~~
dark blood staining their humble linen.
It is painful
to approach the lord in rushing night ~~
his touch like fire that rips the face,
twisting the sinews of the world
to make
a beatific faith.
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Dreiser, Theodore,
SISTER CARRIE.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Penguin, 1994), 500 pages.
~~~ American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differed almost as
much as biology before and after Darwin," said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie,
Dreiser's great first novel, transformed the conventional "fallen woman" story into
a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young
Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city,
becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who
elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's unsparing,
nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and
the work retains the power to shock readers today.
$14.00
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Dreiser, Theodore,
SISTER CARRIE, JENNIE GERHARDT, TWELVE MEN.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (Library of America, 1987), 1168 pages.
~~~ Sister Carrie traces the fate of a small-town girl drawn into the brutal
metropolitan worlds of Chicago and New York. The vital but naive heroine of
Jennie Gerhardt emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her.
With honest emotion and respect for unvarnished truth, Twelve Men muses
on the lives of ordinary men in search of lasting values with which to face the
new century.
$40.00
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~ SOLD ~
[Dobson] Arner, Robert D.,
DOBSON'S ENCYLOPEDIA: THE PUBLISHER, TEXT & PUBLICATION OF AMERICA'S FIRST BRITANNICA, 1789-1803.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. NEW, still in shrinkwrap. "The only
study of the most prominent American printer, publisher and bookseller between
the years 1785 and 1822, and his most notable publications, a Hebrew Bible and
the first Americanized edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The work traces
Dobson's important place in the intellectual and cultural history of the early
United States and also provides a full picture of the marketing, editing,
production and publication of the encyclopedia." 295 pages.
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