Tales. London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845

FIRST EDITION, ENGLISH ISSUE with the cancel London title page. This is an excellent copy of one of the rarest forms of Poe’s tales, issued in the original cloth from the American sheets with a London title page.

on hold

Julius Caesar. A Tragedy. London: for Hen. Heringman and R. Bentley, 1684

FIRST QUARTO EDITION of Julius Caesar, the first separate edition of one of Shakespeare’s best-known and most-performed plays.

$35,000

A Tale of Two Cities. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859

FIRST EDITION, FIRST BINDING, FIRST PRINTING (with page 213 mis-numbered 113 and sig. b present on the list of illustrations, points that were corrected in later copies of this edition).

$35,000

Two autograph manuscripts signed: Autograph manuscript on the American individual beginning “Or are you one ambitious of great deeds” [and] Autograph manuscript poem fragment signed “Kentucky”. No place, c. 1862

This leaf contains two wonderful Whitman manuscripts. The first is an unpublished manuscript in which Whitman discusses two of the great themes of his writing: the work of strengthening, purifying, and completing oneself and the place of the individual in American democracy. The second, written on the verso of “Or are you ambitious” manuscript, is an unpublished working manuscript from Whitman’s Civil War poem “Kentucky.”

$28,000

A superb American literary autograph album. Various dates, Mainly 1870s

This magnificent album presents a who’s who of American literature featuring autographs, often with substantial quotations from poems, by American literary giants such as Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, and Holmes. The album’s owner had direct access to a wide array of literary figures and considerable powers of persuasion to convince them to write at length in this treasured album.

$25,000

Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. New York: Harper, 1851

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. “Moby Dick is a story of the sea … Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale” (Lewis Mumford). As late as May of 1850 Melville described this first Moby-Dick as “the Whaling voyage” in a letter to Richard Henry Dana:  “It will be a strange sort of book, I fear, blubber is blubber you know; tho you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree & to cook the thing up one needs throw in a little fancy. The descriptions are the finest, most accurate and entertaining of any narrative of sea life that has ever been published.” 

$25,000

Le Juif Errant [The Wandering Jew]. Paris: Paulin, 1844-45

First edition of Sue’s The Wandering Jew.

$24,000

Walt Whitman’s Books. [Washington, D.C., 1872]

Whitman designed this rare broadside to promote his works in bookstores. The broadside advertises four of the author’s most recent publications, together with a biography of Whitman by his friend John Burroughs. Leaves of Grass was in its fifth edition by this date. Although the broadside was designed for bookstore displays, Whitman referred to it as a “show bill” in a note to W. D. O’Connor.

$22,500

Early Draft Autograph Manuscript of “Excelsior,” incorporated into an Autograph Letter Signed to Samuel Cutler Ward (“My dear Excelsior”).. Cambridge, 30 September 1841

In this outstanding literary letter, Longfellow writes in full and sends an early draft of his beloved poem “Excelsior,” commenting on its meaning and significance and writing out all thirty-six lines.

$22,000

Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1939

FIRST EDITION, the deluxe issue, one of only 425 numbered copies signed by James Joyce. The notoriously difficult Finnegans Wake is probably the most ambitious work of literature of the twentieth century.  The writing of Finnegans Wake occupied Joyce’s life from 1922, the year of the publication of Ulysses, until 1939, two years before the author’s death.

$18,500