Search Results: Spring 2022 from Reginald C. Williams Rare Books

Tarkington's classic novel of small-town American social anxiety and romantic awkwardness, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, and wonderfully filmed by George Steven's (with Katherine Hepburn) in 1935. This reprint, issued to coincide with the release of the film, has beautiful (uncredited) jacket art depicting Hepburn in a front porch swing, although the book itself, alas, contains no illustrations from the movie. (The heyday of the original "Photoplay Editions," most of which contained either four or eight stills, was over by the mid-1930s.)

Large thick 4to. Pp [2] XXX 930 with a portrait of Lincoln as a frontis. Contemp. half black morocco, raised bands, black title label, gilt lettered spine, brown cloth bds. Marbled edges and eps, text slightly toned. An excellent copy. A thick volume of tributes from around the world to the late Abraham Lincoln.

Octavo, original Publisher's maroon cloth. A good to very good copy showing moderate wear and rubbing with a bright spine and strong inner hinges. Internally clean and complete. Housed in a custom clamshell box. FIRST EDITION of this groundbreaking analysis of heredity by the founder of eugenics, with the first appearance of his coined word eugenics (page 24), with an original photographic frontispiece of composite portraits and four plates of analyses, one double-page in color. This is Galton s best-known work-on the inheritance of talent-scholarly, artistic, and athletic-the raw data being the records of notable families (DSB V:266). Employing the statistical techniques for which he became famous, Galton considers the influence of genetic inheritance in humans on everything from facial features to mental imagery, from fluency to enthusiasm. On the publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by his cousin, Charles Robert Darwin, Galton at once became a convert to the views there enounced and began… Read More

FIRST EDITION. Octavo, 270 pp., [1] leaf (ads) attractive contemporary paneled calf. No spine label. Half-title is present and the text is very fresh for its age with white pages. The rear hinge is a little weak and shaken, but an excellent contemporary copy usually found rebound or in later bindings. Housed and chemised in a quarter morocco slipcase with marbled boards and a green morocco label by the Heritage Bindery which will insure protection. British clergyman Francis Hutchinson was "the man who gave the coup de grace to the witch delusion in England" (Robbins), leveling "a final and deadly blow at the dying superstition" (Note stein). "Of most interest to him were the witchcraft accusations at Boston and Salem, and… [the case] of Jane Wenham (1712), which provoked intense passions and vicious politicking… Hutchinson's account of witchcraft is thoroughly modern a history book 'of the moment'… and his carefully modest appeal for reform of the laws on witchcraft was indeed heeded, although… Read More

Six volumes. tall quarto (10 by 12 inches), publisher's decorative cloth , uncut. Two steel-engraved portrait frontispieces, 3 folding maps (small professional repair to close the tear to map in volume 6), 38 plates & 6 etchings (signed by the artist), with numerous illustrations. The very scarce London subscriber's edition. Spines slightly faded but a beautiful near-fine set with bright decorative cover now housed in a custom red slipcase.Perhaps no adventurer is more closely connected with Africa than Lord Stanley, whose various expeditions did more to reveal the nature of that continent than any modern explorer. His 1887 mission to relieve the besieged governor of Egypt, his last mission to Africa, ended miserably when Stanley arrived only to learn that the governor did not care to be relieved, but instead was angry at the Englishman for interfering in his affairs. This account contains the harrowing details of Stanley's journey through the nearly impenetrable Ituri, or Great Congo, Forest, which… Read More

Third edition of Part I, first edition of Part II & Part III of the Abbé Nollet's letters on electricity five of which are addressed to Benjamin Franklin with eight finely engraved folding plates, fully complete in 3 volumes. The first menace [to Nollet's theory] was the Philadelphia theory of the Leyden jar, which unfortunately for Nollet had been discovered just after the system of effluence and affluence… Nollet, eager to retain the standard theory of electrical motions, insisted on transparency and mechanical action… Nollet recognized these menaces and replied in an amusing set of Lettres sur l'electricité (1753), containing a wealth of counterexamples which drew their strength from Franklin's occasional obscurities, imprecisions, exaggerations and inappropriate appeals to traditional effluvial models… [Nollet's] tireless ingenuity, expressed in seven memoirs and two more volumes of Lettres, kept the Academy bamboozled until his death in 1770" (DSB With 12 intaglio figures. At H. L. Guerin… Read More

First English Edition NEPOS, Cornelius. [FINCH, Leopold William, translator]. The Lives of Illustrious Men. Written in Latin by Corn. Nepos, And Done into English by Several Hands. Oxon: Printed for Hen. Cruttenden, 1684. First English edition. Octavo (6 7/8 x 4 1/4 inches; 174 x 109 mm). [56], 272, pp. Frontispiece portrait of Nepos. Full contemporary brown calf. A very good copy that s been professionally re-backed by the Heritage Bindery with raised bands, a red morocco title label and blind-stamped compartments. "Cornelius Nepos, A Roman historian, a friend of Atticus and Catullus. His chief work was 'De Viris Illustribus', of which part survives." ( The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 574). HBS 64676. This particular copy is from the Library of lawyer and politician Benjamin Adams (1764-1837) which carries his inked ownership inscription dated Oct 24, 1787. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1809 until 1814, later winning election to the Massachusetts Senate… Read More

Octavo, Publisher's cloth. First edition, first printing of one of the most significant works on the philosophy of science. The Logic of Scientific Discovery was originally published in Germany in 1934, and Popper rewrote and republished it in English in 1959, with the New York edition preceding this much rarer UK edition. A fine copy in a near-fine unclipped dustwrapper which shows some light scattered foxing on the spine and a contemporary ownership inscription on the title page. The book is mostly unopened and looks mostly unread save for the ownership signature. A nice copy.

12mo, original cloth with decorative floral design, spine sunned a little, decorative endpapers, [xii], (7)-265pp. The free front endpaper is ink inscribed "Compliments of Harriet H. Robinson Feb. 1883." There are other provenance markings from the Berkeley Massachusetts Public Library, which apparently received the book as a gift from Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts Hon. Roger Wolcott. KRICHMAR 1944. First Edition. A bright, clean very good copy now Mylar protected & housed in a custom slipcase. Very uncommon signed with a noted provenance. "In 1881 Harriet Hanson Robinson became one of the founders of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Woman Suffrage Association, becoming the recording secretary with her daughter Hattie as President (to Harriet's dismay; she had hoped to fill the position). It was during this time that Robinson would write her acclaimed book Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (1881), a largely personal account of the struggle for woman suffrage which largely… Read More

Octavo, original blind stamped brown-gray cloth. Interior generally clean with mild & occasional foxing, mere trace of damp staining at the rear, very mild edgewear, minimal soiling to original cloth. A very good copy now housed in a brown custom cloth clamshell box. First edition of the publisher and editor's memoir issued the year after his murder—killed by "five bullets in his heart, while defending his fourth press from an armed, arsonist mob"—only two years after he denounced the lynching by fire of a free black man, as an act of "savage barbarity," with introduction by John Quincy Adams, a seminal record of a key event in America's abolitionist battle and the history of the First Amendment. A book seldom found in the publisher's cloth.

FIRST EDITION with all points per Smith. Two Octavo volumes. [i-vii] viii-ix [x] Xi [xii], [1] 2-320, [1] - 36 (catalogue dated January 1865); [i-v] vi-vii [viii] , [1] 2-309 [ -312] (colophon and ads), [4] (catalogue dated November 1865). Forty inserted plates after Marcus Stone.Publisher's original purple sand grain cloth, Boards conventionally blocked in blind, Spines decorated and lettered in gilt. Original pale yellow in papers. Previous owners signature to front pay down of same volume; Hugh Mitchell Pitlochry. On the half title Mr. Mitchell has added his notary embossed stamp (reading High Mitchell, Notary Public, 1874). The second volume with the binders ticket (Virtue & Co.) On the lower front pace down and with our armorial plate of Beatrice Lady Ellenborough. With a small embossed stamp on front free in paper of book seller WH Smith and son. The first volume has been carefully and almost imperceptibly rebacked by the Heritage Bindery. Volume two is a bit darker than volume one extremities… Read More

Small folio. pp [16], 398, [2], fine engraved frontispiece portrait bust of Lucian by Faithmore, with verse underneath, bound in contemporary speckled polished calf, spine with braided bands and red Morocco label, sympathetically rebacked by the Heitage Bindery using the original spine. A very good fresh copy throughout with nice margins now housed in a cloth clamshell box with a red morocco label. FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE. Much confusion surrounds this title, as to whether or not it was issued with the second edition of Hicks translated Lucian, as indicated by the title page, but nowhere else referred to. Hick s second edition was indeed issued in 1663, though by a different publisher, and is often found bound up with the second issue of the present collection, which is dated 1664. Copies of this 1663 first issue appears to be complete without it. Since this copy is in a contemporary binding, it s independence of the Hick s is quite certain. Madan makes this clear when he says [III. 2642]: The two… Read More

London: The Daily Chronicle, [1915. First Edition]. Original printed gray wrappers. In a thumbsoiled and slightly worn dust jacket. an anti war essay of 64 pages. Interior clean, devoid of inscriptions, marks, tears or folds. All pages tight within binding. Grey paper covers with red titles clean and unscuffed. Beige paper dustjacket over printed with two designs, showing idyllic rural scene before the war and big guns firing missiles during war. Dustwrapper is in fragile state but still in one piece with some staining on edges. A very good copy of a very scarce item (especially so in the fragile dust wrapper) now covered in a Mylar sleeve and housed in a custom blue cloth slipcase. The dustwrapper is seldom found with this book.

Original brown cloth, original printed paper spine label; pp. 5-227, (228), (blank leaf). with 11 haunting wood engravings. Text has moderate foxing throughout as do the plates. First Boston edition, issued by famed abolitionist Isaac Knapp, of Bourne's provocative work, preceded only by the 1834 Middleton, CT. first edition, this incendiary antebellum work is by the controversial minister who was expelled from the church for verbally attacking ministers and slave-owners in his congregation—"one of the first radical abolitionists"—featuring eleven woodcut-engraved illustrations of slavery's "appalling and atrocious criminality," exceptional in unrestored original cloth."Bourne was a crucial figure in the history of the antislavery movement… One of the first radical abolitionists… he was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) and a frequent contributor to Garrison's famous paper The Liberator" (ANB). Born in England, Bourne emigrated to the U.S. in 1804. Following a brief… Read More

First Edition 1747. Complete with 41 plates. Tall folio (11 by 17 inches), contemporary full tan polished calf newly rebacked to style with elaborately gilt-decorated spine with seven compartments. Engraved frontispiece portrait by George Vertue after Isaac Whood, 17 vignette tailpieces, and 41 full-page engraved plates (four double-page, two of these folding) by Boitard after Paderni and others. Covers & corners slightly rubbed. Internally there is a little intermittent light spotting, but generally a clean and bright copy now housed in a custom slipcase made by The Heritage Bindery. Many years in the making, this large and finely printed volume traces classical mythology in Roman art and literature. "Remains an agreeable book, owing to the urbanity of its old-fashioned scholarship, the justice of some incidental observations, and its affluent stores of quotation; and, as an intellectual if heterogeneous banquet, may be compared with the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus. Gibbon speaks of its taste and… Read More

FIRST EDITION. Octavo, publisher's cloth. An undisputed classic in the philosophy of social science, the substantial content of which marks a continuation of Popper's relentless pursuit of the principal of falsification, as outlined in the seminal Logic of Scientific Discovery, brought to bear on the methodology of historicist social science. It is a broad rebuttal of holism, that is, the view that social groups and societies are greater than the sum of their parts and can be treated as 'organic' entities in their own right, as well as the predominance of the dialectical conceptions of social change in the methodology of the social sciences. This copy belonged to Philosopher Sidney Hook (December 20, 1902 July 12, 1989) who was an American philosopher of the pragmatist school known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics (Wikipedia). Tipped in is the actual invoice for the book purchase dated from Blackwell s Ltd. dated 11/18/57. A… Read More

FIRST EDITION AND FIRST WITH THE RACKHAM ILLUSTRATIONS. The English edition was not illustrated. Stories from English history told by romantic characters to two children over whom Puck the fairy had cast a midsummer spell. It can count both as historical fantasy – since some of the stories told of the past have clear magical elements, and as contemporary fantasy – since it depicts a magical being active and practicing his magic in the England of the early 1900s when the book was written.First edition and the first with illustrations. Four illustrations in color by Arthur Rackham. 8vo, publisher's original green cloth, the spine and upper cover lettered and pictorially decorated in gilt and black with the design of the famous caravelle sailing ship. [8], 277 pp. A very pleasing copy, gilt and cloth bright, only light age evidence with slight rubbing to the tips and spine ends and slight bowing of the binding. Uncut with pages largely unopened with no previous ownership signatures.

Octavo, 294pp. + 14pp ads. Publisher's blush cloth with stamped board and spine. A near fine copy in a beautiful striking dustwrapper with an iconic image of Jean Harlow. This particular Photoplay edition was released to coincide with the 1932 and followed the release of the original 1931 novel by a year. The film was adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and directed by Jack Conway and starred Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Ina Merkel, Leila Hyams and an early appearance by Charles Boyer. The story is about a woman, Lil Andrew's, who uses her sex appeal to move up the social ladder. This is the first film Harlow made under her new MGM contract which was acquired from Howard Hughes' Caddo Company for $30,000 by Irving Thalberg. Red Headed Woman was a major hit back in 1932 and remains one of cinema's iconic pre code era films. Interestingly, this particularly copy does not have stills from the film as all Photoplay editions did not include stills and by the mid 30s, the practice had virtually ended.… Read More

310p, Publisher's cloth, one portrait, twelve plates, light wear to corners and spine ends, sporadic foxing, but a very good to near-fine copy. First edition. Housed in a custom made clamshell box. "Wise's demonstrations of balloons, his invention of the rip panel, and his long distance record of 804 miles finitely establish his right to be considered the first American aeronaut of any consequence. His writings give evidence of an original, searching, and impartial mind." DAB, Vo. XX. John Wise was the most famous of all American aeronauts. He made his first ascension in 1835 and devoted the rest of his life to aeronautics, tireless in his effort to find useful applications for the balloon" (Aeronautica Americana). Gamble notes: "Early history of balloons and parachutes, with accounts of the author's flights during the middle years of the 19th century." And also in DAB: "Wise's demonstrations regarding the safety of balloons, his invention of the rip panel, and his long-distance record of 804 miles… Read More

[1], 519, [1]; xii, 507, [1], . . HB. 2 vols, 4to, cont. leather, rubbed/scuffed, corners repaired, red and green leather-title pieces to spines, marbled endpapers. Institutional library bookplate to pastedowns, small ink stamp to title pages, blind stamps to titlepages and corners of final leaves; minor scattered foxing. A very good set now housed in a custom slipcase. Uncommon in full contemporary calf. First edition of the work that Kames himself referred to as his "magnum opus," a "major synopsis of Enlightenment philosophical anthropology," two quarto volumes in contemporary polished calf. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, was a judge in the supreme courts of Scotland and wrote extensively on morals, religion, education, aesthetics, history, political economy, and law, including natural law. Home was a polygenist, he believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In this book, Home claimed that the environment, climate,… Read More