
The Accidental Bookseller
Specializing in Interesting and Uncommon Books in Unusually Nice Condition
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Burroughs, William S.
Port of Saints
$1,200.00
Burroughs, William S.
Covent 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.
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Carroll, Jim
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. less
moreOffered for Sale by: The Redbridge Book Co. -
Peterkin, Julia
Black April
$800.00Bobbs Merrill: Indianapolis, 1927. First edition, first issue with ‘ducks quacked’ on page 17 (Ahearn Collected Books). “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). less
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Jarrell, Randall
Selected Poems
$1,500.00Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1955. First edition. Unique copy, inscribed on the front pastedown and featuring a holograph of ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’, commonly viewed as the poet’s most widely known and frequently anthologized work. From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. First published in 1945, the poem drew directly from Jarrell’s own involvement with military aircraft and airmen during WW2. “While the people and events of World War II are commonly found in Jarrell’s poetry, this poem is unique for its lack of wit. Indeed, the grim tone of this poem places it firmly in the Modernist movement of literature.” Jarrell reportedly “admitted to fearing most of his reputation as a poet is tied up in [this poem]. But, there are certainly worse outcomes for a poet’s career in this poem which has been referred to as the best war poem ever written.” Bottom corners a little scuffed, else nearly fine in good dust wrapper with unprofessional repairs to interior. less
moreOffered for Sale by: The Redbridge Book Co. -
Bailyn, Bernard
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
$500.00Harvard University Press: Cambridge (MA), 1974. First Edition of this winner of the 1975 National Book Award in History. Inscribed “with best regards”, signed and dated by the author. The recipient, a student pursuing his MPA at Harvard where Bailyn was a professor at the time, had previously written in his name and date, hence a difference in hand-writing in the inscription. Spine a bit creased but book is tight and seemingly unread. Near fine in little rubbed, near fine dust wrapper. Books signed by Bailyn are scarce indeed. Few historians since World War II have left an imprint on that field of study that rivals Professor Bailyn’s. In his classic 1967 work, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” Bailyn reshaped the study of the origins of the American Revolution, maintaining that the ideology of liberty and freedom was ingrained in the colonists, displacing Charles A Beard’s then dominant theory that the American Revolution was primarily a matter of class warfare and that the rhetoric of freedom was meaningless. On topic after topic, in more than 20 books that he wrote or edited, Bailyn shifted the direction of scholarly inquiry, in the process winning two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a Bancroft Prize (the most prestigious award given to scholars of American history) and, in 2011, the National Humanities Medal. less
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