Gift Ideas

  1. Aristotle: From Antiquity to the Modern Era.

    Preface by Martin J. Gross. Essays by Benjamin Morison and Barbara Scalvini.

    Lewes, D. Giles Ltd for the Martin J. Gross Family Foundation, 2021.

    Aristotle’s influence towers over western philosophy and science. His astonishing range and depth – philosophy and logic, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics – make him indisputably the most important intellectual figure in the western tradition before the modern age.

    £30

  2. POWYS, John Cowper.

    Autobiography.

    London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, [1934].

    First edition, signed on the half-title ‘John Cowper Powys, April 1935’. A very nice copy of a work not often found signed.

    £250

  3. POUND, Ezra, and Noel STOCK, translators.

    Love Poems of ancient Egypt.

    [New York, New Directions, 1962].

    First edition.

    £75

  4. LEWIS, Wyndham, and Anne Gladys LEWIS.

    Christmas card to the Bridsons.

    [1950s].

    ‘To Joyce [née Thirlaway] + Geoffrey with Christmas love from Froanna + Wyndham …’

    £50

  5. PRINCE, F[rank].

    T[empleton]. Soldiers Bathing and other Poems.

    London, The Fortune Press, [1954].

    First edition, Prince’s second collection, inscribed ‘with good wishes from the author, F. T. Prince. 23 April, 1954.’

    £200

  6. RACHEWILTZ, Boris de.

    L’Elemento magico in Ezra Pound.

    Milan, All’insegna del pesce d’oro [Scheiwiller], 1965.

    First edition, no. 182 of 1000 copies, an essay by Pound’s son-in-law published on the occasion of Pound’s eightieth birthday.

    £150

  7. BURROUGHS, William.

    The Naked Lunch.

    Paris, Olympia Press, [1960].

    First edition, second printing – the first had a decorative border on the title-page, was priced 1500 francs on the rear cover, and was issued with a dust-jacket (not the earliest copies). After the franc was devalued on 1 January 1960, copies were over-stamped with a new price; and shortly after there...

    £200

  8. MITCHISON, Naomi; Wyndham LEWIS, illustrator.

    Beyond this Limit …

    [London,] Jonathan Cape, [1935].

    First edition. This was Lewis’s only collaboration with Mitchison but she arranged for the publication of his Left Wings over Europe the following year, and they remained friends until his death. 32 designs by Lewis served as the inspiration for Mitchison’s narrative.

    £75

  9. STRICKLAND, Hugh Edwin, and A. 

    G. MELVILLE.  The Dodo and its Kindred; or, the History, Affinities and Osteology of the Dodo,...

    London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve … 1848. 

    An extra-illustrated family copy of the first scientific monograph on the dodo, and a related flightless bird, the Rodrigues solitaire, with the bookplates of the author and his father.

    £7500

  10. ANDREWS, Mark E.

    The Science and Engineering of Water: An illustrated catalogue of books and manuscripts on Italian hydraulics,...

    Toronto, A.E. Publications, 2022.

    A finely bound deluxe copy, one of twenty copies, of Mark Andrews’s lavishly illustrated catalogue tracing the development of science and engineering through the early modern period.

    £675

  11. PAPINI, Roberto.

    Le Arti d’Oggi: Architettura e Arti Decorative in Europa.

    Milan and Rome, Bestetti and Tumminelli, 1930.

    First edition of a thorough and extensively illustrated survey of architectural and artistic styles and artworks from across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, compiled by the Italian art historian Roberto Papini (1883–1957), director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and later...

    £300

  12. HOLLAR, Wenceslaus, attributed.

    [Portraits of celebrated Courtezans.]

    Nineteenth century?

    A famous series of portraits depicting Restoration-era London courtesans, long attributed to Hollar, but that attribution rejected by Pennington and New Hollstein.

    £1200

  13. ROTHERY, Charles William.

    Notes on a yacht voyage to Hardanger Fjord, and the adjacent estuaries. By a yachting dabbler. With numerous...

    London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman; Keswick, James Ivison, [1855].

    First edition, second issue (with the mounted lithographs coloured) of this handsomely illustrated account of Rothery’s yachting cruise to the fjords of Norway, ‘charming and sublime scenery, which the sketches are intended, though slightly, to pourtray’ (Preface).

    £250

  14. RUSKIN, John.

    The stones of Venice … With illustration drawn by the author. Fourth edition.

    Orpington, Kent, George Allen, 1886.

    A deluxe copy, one of 220 copies, of the fourth expanded edition, printed on Van Gelder laid paper with the plates on India paper.

    £375

  15. [MANNING, Frederic.]

    The Middle Parts of Fortune. Somme and Ancre, 1916.

    Piazza Press, Issued to subscribers by Peter Davies, 1929.

    First, limited and unexpurgated edition of this masterpiece of the First World War, published anonymously (Manning was only identified as the author shortly before his death in 1943); no. 205 of 520 numbered copies.

    £750

  16. BREREWOOD, Edward. 

    Enquiries touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions through the cheife Parts of the World … 

    London, Printed [by Eliot’s Court Press] for John Bill, 1614. 

    First edition.  Brerewood, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, was a scholar in many fields who published nothing in his own lifetime (he died in 1613).  Enquiries, seen through the press by a nephew, explores the spread of ancient, eastern, and modern languages, discusses the...

    £3000

  17. SOPHOCLES. POUND, Ezra, translator.

    Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound.

    London, Neville Spearman, [1956].

    First edition, inscribed by the editor Denis Goacher ‘For Geoffrey [Bridson]: Nov. ’56 / This milestone / Just missed witnessing / The total collapse of / D. G.’ – Bridson had co-produced the play for BBC radio in April 1954.

    £1000

  18. YRVEN, Marcelle. 

    La comédienne et le féminisme. 

    Paris, L. Pichon, 1914. 

    First edition of this feminist work on the necessity of a thorough literary and cultural education for women in theatre, by the celebrated actress Marcelle Yrven, presented to the editor-in-chief of Le Figaro’s literary supplement. 

    £250

  19. STEPHENSON BLAKE. 

    A Book of Types – SL1. 

    Sheffield & London, [1956]. 

    Two beautiful type specimen books from the last typefoundry in England.  A Book of Types (‘SL1’) is the first in a series of five type specimen lists issued by Stephenson Blake from 1956-1963.  In this first issue, among some of the various original designs of the foundry, such as...

    £85

  20. POPE, Alexander.

    The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, with his last Corrections, Additions, and Improvements, in four Volumes,...

    London, ‘printed under the direction of J. Bell, British Library, Strand, bookseller to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,’ 1787...

    A good set of Pope’s works, printed for inclusion in Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain. Initially imported from Edinburgh and issued with new titles, Bell’s Poets of Great Britain was intended to provide attractive and portable works of British poets ‘from Chaucer to Churchill’,...

    £175