Foreign Literature
Contact Donovan Rees
This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.-
GRASS, Günter.
Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand. Ein deutsches Trauerspiel.
Neuwied & Berlin, Luchterhand, 1966.
First edition of a play, ‘The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising’, in which Bertolt Brecht appears as the Boss, who declines to leave his theatrical preoccupation to support the East Berlin workers' reformist uprising.
£100
-
GRASS, Günter.
Über meinen Lehrer Döblin und andere Vorträge.
Berlin, Literarisches Colloquium, 1968.
First edition, signed by Grass on fly-leaf.
£50
-
GRASS, Günter.
Gesammelte Gedichte. Mit einem Vowort von Heinrich Vormweg.
Neuwied & Berlin, Luchterhand, 1971.
First edition.
£50
-
GRASS, Günter.
Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke.
Neuwied & Darmstadt, Luchterhand, 1972.
First edition: an account of Grass’s travels as a campaigner for the Social Democrats and Willy Brandt in the 1969 election, interwoven with a story about Hermann Ott, a collector of snails, who takes refuge from the Nazis with a Kashubian who wants to become a German.
£75
-
GRASS, Günter.
Der Butt.
Darmstadt & Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1977
First edition: a review copy, with the words ‘Unkorrigiertes, unverkäufliches Lese-Exemplar’ printed on front cover.
£100
-
GRASS, Günter.
Das Treffen in Telgte. Eine Erzählung.
Darmstadt & Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1979.
First edition.
£75
-
GRASS, Günter.
Kopfgeburten, oder Die Deutschen sterben aus.
Darmstadt & Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1980.
First edition.
£40
-
GRASS, Günter.
Die Rättin.
Darmstadt & Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1986.
First edition. The narrator receives as a present a female rat, who demonstrates in several stories that the rats will inherit the earth.
£50
-
GRASS, Günter.
The Danzig Trilogy [The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years].
New York, Pantheon & Harcourt Brace & World, 1962-65.
First US editions, all translated by Ralph Manheim, and first published in the original German in 1959, 1961 and 1963.
£500
-
GRASS, Günter.
Selected Poems … With translations from the German by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton.
New York, Harcourt Brace & World Inc., 1966.
First US edition, with the original German on facing pages, of poems originally appearing in Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (1956) and Gleisdreieck (1960).
£50
-
GRASS, Günter.
Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke.
[Neuwied & Darmstadt,] Luchterhand, [1972].
First edition: an account of Grass’s travels as a campaigner for the Social Democrats and Willy Brandt in the 1969 election, interwoven with a story about Hermann Ott, a collector of snails, who takes refuge from the Nazis with a Kashubian who wants to become a German.
£75
-
GRAY, [Thomas].
Poems by Mr. Gray.
Dublin, William Sleater, 1775.
An attractive Dublin edition of Gray’s poems, joined by two parodies and a ‘burlesque ode’, and parallel translations of his Elegy written in a Country Churchyard into Italian and Latin.
£125
-
GRIGOROVICH, Dmitrii Vasil’evich.
Povesti i razskazy … Chast’ pervaia [– shestaia] [Stories and tales. Part I [– VI]].
Moscow, E. Barfknekht, 1858, & V. Grachev, 1859.
First collected edition of Grigorovich’s fiction, including the important stories Derevnia (The Village, 1846), Anton Goremyka (1847), Rybaki (The Fishermen, 1853) and Shkola gostepriimstva (The School of Hospitality, 1855).
£2000
-
GUERINI, Professor Giovanni.
Fireside Entertainments; or, A Series of Interesting Tales ...
London: Chapman and Hall ... 1874.
First edition in English of Guerini’s Trenta Novelle (1873), a collection of short stories with contemporary or historical Italian settings by Bulwer-Lytton’s Italian translator. In the original language these stories--’Rubens’ Studio’, ‘The Uncle from America’, ‘Shut up in Church’,...
£150
-
GUMILEV, Nikolai Stepanovich.
Farforovyi pavil’on. Kitaiskie Stikhi [The Porcelain Pavilion. Chinese poems].
Petrograd, “Mysl’”, 1922.
Second edition (first 1918) of Gumilev’s paraphrases of Chinese and Indonesian lyrics, published the year after his death.
£100
-
GUMILEV, Nikolai Stepanovich.
Shater. Stikhi [The tent. Verses].
Revel [i.e. Tallinn], “Bibliofil”, [1921].
First illustrated edition. ‘The publishing house claims that this edition was made from the manuscript handed over by Gumilev in June 1921, the year he was arrested and executed. It contains more material than the [first edition published the same year]’ (Kilgour 427, note).
£250
-
GUMILEV, Nikolai Stepanovich, translator. GAUTIER, Théophile.
Emali i kamei [Émaux et camées].
[St Petersburg, M. V. Popov, 1914.]
First edition, very rare: Gumilev’s first published volume of translation, and Gautier’s first appearance in Russian. This is the only contemporary edition; it first received a reprint (in a bilingual edition) some 75 years later.
£850
-
HAMSUN, Knut.
Ny Jord. Roman.
Copenhagen, P. G. Philipsens Forlag, 1893.
First edition of Shallow Soil, an early novel by the Norwegian nobel prize-winning author. Hamsun himself described the novel as being ‘about Norwegian youth’, ‘full of symbolism, but so little Ibsenish, I hope, that it can be understood.’
£200