USD
GBP
EUR
CAD
AUD
ZAR
The Accidental Bookseller
Specializing in Interesting and Uncommon Books in Unusually Nice Condition
Membership(s): IOBA, FABA
Black April
$800.00
Peterkin, Julia
Bobbs Merrill: Indianapolis, 1927. Â First edition, first issue with ‘ducks quacked’ on page 17 (Ahearn Collected Books). Â
“An extraordinary novel of Negro life on an isolated plantation” signed by the author on front free endpaper.  Black April was “accepted by the critics as being one of the best books ever written about the southern negro” (The Sunday Oregonian).
A very good copy, gilt on spine and front cover dulled as usual in very good, first issue dust wrapper without Crawford blurb, price intact, extremities of spine a little chipped, one small edge tear to rear.
Peterkin went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, the first southern novelist to receive that honor.  A household name for the better part of three decades, “Peterkin’s accomplishment lay in her upending the traditional plantation novel by replacing its gross stereotypes with rural black southerners of complexity, stamina, integrity, and courage, while valorizing the African spiritual inheritance as a transcendent force of cultural regeneration. Because no Uncle Toms, Aunt Jemimas or Colonels clad in white linen inhabited Peterkin’s fiction (indeed, white characters made rare appearances), and because she dared depict tender love and sex between black people, prickly white southerners viewed her suspiciously, perceiving her work as inflammatory and pornographic. In a letter to her mentor H.L. Mencken, Peterkin admitted the sting of her own family’s disdain. Her grown son, she relayed, urged her to write about ‘beautiful white men and women, not n-words.’  In a poignant confession of her alienation she tersely wrote, ‘No beautiful white people live in my head.'” (Life out of Darkness: The Recovery of Julia Peterkin, Forgotten Pulitzer Prize Winner by Elizabeth Robeson, M.Phil, Columbia University).
Related products
-
Historian's First Book with Warm Inscription
The New England Mind in Transition
$400.00New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973. First edition of author’s first book, warmly inscribed to Ellis’ close associates: “For Rik & Margot / Who have had / the dubious privilege to / watch young Ellis in / transition as he wrote / this book. Johnson was no / more indebted to that “School / of the Prophets” than I am / to you” Signed as “Joe Ellis” and dated in the year of publication. A fine copy in near fine dust wrapper with some slight fading to the spine, trifle rubbing to the spine tips, one tiny nick, and a little soiling. Ellis won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his work Founding Brothers, exploring how the interactions between the leading figures of the US Constitutional era profoundly influenced the early development of the Republic. Ellis is also credited with leading a revival of interest in John Adams, a President he viewed as under-appreciated for both his character and achievements. The New England Mind grew out of Ellis’ PhD dissertation at Yale (The Puritan Mind in Transition: The American Samuel Johnson (1696-1772)). While at Yale, Ellis became close friends with Richard “Rik” Warch, a fellow graduate student and then member of the faculty, and his wife Margot. Warch was the author of a history of Yale in the early 18th century, attended by Johnson, and Ellis cites Warch’s doctoral dissertation as “the best secondary account of the intellectual and religious climate at early Yale” in the bibliographical essay of his work. The “School of Prophets” in the inscription refers to the title of Warch’s own book-length treatment of his dissertation (School of Prophets. Yale College, 1701 – 1740 also published by the Yale University Press).
Offered for Sale by: Founding Lines -
Scarce Hardbound Edition Signed by Poet
Living At The Movies
$650.00New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973. First edition of the poet’s third collection of poems and first to be issued by a commercial publisher.  Issued in both hardcover and wrappers simultaneously, this is the scarce hardbound edition. Estimates put the print run for the hardbound edition at a couple of hundred, with few likely distributed to the public. Signed by the poet on the title page and very uncommon thus. Darkening to board edges as is common for this title. Small spot to text block, last page has a small stain and some bleed through from the rust colored end paper. Overall, a better than very good copy. Pictorial dust wrapper, featuring wraparound cover artwork by Larry Rivers and Ted Berrigan blurb, presents very nicely indeed, overall very good, not clipped and without any tears, chips, fading or rubbing but a little tanned at the edges, slight staining to rear flap, front flap a little creased, and verso of dust wrapper is textured, cause indeterminable, with the result that the front and rear panels are not tactilely smooth.
Offered for Sale by: The Redbridge Book Co. -
A Founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School
Walter Reed and Yellow Fever
$900.00Baltimore: The Norman, Remington Company, 1923.  Third Edition Revised. Likely a Christmas gift to a close colleague with a full page inscription from Kelly. Howard Atwood Kelly was one of the four founding chairs (along with William Stewart Halsted, William Osler, and William Welch) at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and creators of the Hopkins legacy.  Kelly was a clinical innovator, performing the first successful Cesarean section (C-section) in Philadelphia in 1888, and pioneered the use of radium in the treatment of gynecological cancer. The consummate clinician, his name is behind the Kelly clamp and he is the one identified with the test to find the ureter by stimulating its peristalsis by touching it with a forcep. His lasting legacy was the residency program in obstetrics and gynecology at Hopkins and the generation of leaders he trained. The recipient is almost assuredly fellow physician James R. Rankin of Muncy, Pennsylvania. In 1905, Rankin accompanied Kelly and Osler to Great Britain, “sharing with them their meetings with eminent British surgeons, attending clinics and having the honor of speaking at a banquet in London’s famous Guild Hall tendered the distinguished Americans by the Royal College of Surgeons” (Rankin obituary). A very good copy, top edge gilt, deckle edges, two interior pages severely browned from inserted news clipping.  Accompanied by the quite scarce dust wrapper, also very good, dust soiled, two small chips to spine, edge wear and a few edge tears.
Offered for Sale by: The Redbridge Book Co. -
Scarce Publication in the Burroughs Canon, Signed
Port of Saints
$1,200.00Covent Garden Press/Am Here Books: London/Ollon (Switzerland).  Dated 1973 though not issued until 1975 due to paper supply shortage. The true first and only edition with this text. A revised edition was issued by Blue Wind Press in 1980.  Only 200 copies printed, 100 numbered and signed, the remainder unsigned.  This is one of the 100 unsigned copies which has been subsequently signed by Burroughs on the title page. A not terribly well made book, this is a nice near fine copy, boards slightly dust soiled, in a near fine example of the fragile dust wrapper, a bit rubbed to the extremities. One of the scarcer publications in the Burroughs canon.
Offered for Sale by: The Accidental Bookseller