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Membership(s): IOBA, ESA, CALIBA
Hurston, Zora Neale JONAH’S GOURD VINE
$16,500.00
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1934.  Hardcover first edition – Hurston’s very uncommon first novel – a major work of the Harlem Renaissance – with an introduction by Fannie Hurst, in a dustjacket with a striking cover illustration by Covarrubias.
An autobiographical novel, based on the story of her father, John Hurston, as he and his wife migrate from Alabama to Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black incorporated town in America, where Zora grew up. She uses events from her childhood and the sermons she heard as a preacher’s daughter to give a rich texture to this novel. Glossary. 316 pp.
Condition: Very good in very good dust jacket. The book is straight and tight but with the usual fading to the edges of the boards, shelfwear to the bottom edges, and the front endpaper has been professionally replaced. In addition, the attractive dust jacket has been expertly repaired, including mending a split along the side of the spine, but the book still retains a few traces of its earlier history as a lending library copy, including a stamp on the front pastedown, a rather appealing notation that it rented for 1c a day, and the date on both the title page and the copyright page had been covered with small star stickers and they are partially obliterated. Scarce in dust jacket.
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Captures the Vanishing Charm of Old New Orleans
Arnold Genthe with a Foreword by Grace King Impressions of Old New Orleans: A Book of Pictures
$300.004to., 250 pp. unpaginated. 100 full page black and white photographic plates printed on rectos only, including many candid portraits of local African Americans, as well as architectural studies, street and garden views. Very Good with small stain on lower right and corner lacking the dust jacket. Item #913202413  This evocative early 20th-century volume showcases the atmospheric photography of Arnold Genthe, whose lens captured the vanishing charm of old New Orleans before modernization transformed its streets. With a warm and insightful foreword by Southern author Grace King, the book offers a rare visual record of the city’s French Quarter, Creole architecture, and street life at a pivotal moment in its history. Genthe’s soft-focus images and masterful compositions evoke the romance and mystery of a bygone era, while King’s prose situates them within the city’s cultural and historical fabric. Published in the 1920s, Impressions of Old New Orleans is among the most beautiful photographic tributes to the Crescent City. Collectors prize this title for its blend of documentary precision and artistic vision, as well as its association with two of the period’s most refined interpreters of place and character. A cornerstone work for enthusiasts of photography, New Orleans history, and Southern Americana.  Genthe [January 8, 1869 August 9, 1942] was a German-born American photographer, best known for his photos of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and his portraits of noted people, from politicians and socialites to literary figures and entertainment celebrities. Uncommon title. Â
Offered for Sale by: 32.1 Rare Books + Ephemera -
10 inscribed John Hersey association copies
Hersey, John The Wall, Marmot Drive, A Single Pebble, Child Buyer, Too Far to Walk, Under the Eye of the Storm, Letter to the Alumni, and The Conspiracy (inscribed)
$775.00Collection of ten books written by John Hersey. Inscribed to Peter Dzwonkoski. All in Hersey’s inimitable style, on the title page. From the collection of Brockport, NY poet William Heyen. All include a note from Heyen regarding the provenance. Peter Dzwonkoski worked under famed bibliographer and archivist Donald Gallup at Yale’s Beinecke Library, then became Director of Rate Book and Special Collections at the University of Rochester. Over decades, he befriended many writers, oversaw exhibitions, published essays on books and book-collecting, delighted in book-talk.  Before he passed, he sold much of his collection to friend and fellow collector, poet William Heyen, author of Depth of Field (1970), Noise in the Trees (1974), The Swastika Poems (1977), Long Island Light (1979), Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (1984), Crazy Horse In Stillness (1996), and Shoah Train (2003). John Hersey is often cited as the father of ‘New Journalism’. The Wall (1950) A novel about events in the Warsaw ghetto from November 1939, with the German occupation, to May 1943, when the last houses in the ghetto were razed. The Wall won the Daroff Memorial Fiction Award of the Jewish Book Council of America and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. It was dramatized by Millard Lampell, produced at the Billy Rose Theater in New York in the early 1960’s and filmed for television by CBS in 1982. Stated first edition. NF / VG+ Marmot Drive (1953) This novel deals with events on two summer days in an out-of-the-way Connecticut village related to the decision of the villagers of Tunxis to launch their long-debated drive to rid a nearby valley of an infestation of marmots. But the drive is merely the catalyst. Its tensions and rigors release a storm of impulses and long-hidden traits in the people involved, so that in the end the natural drama is engulfed by the human drama.Stated first edition. NF / VG+ A Single Pebble (1956) A young American engineer sent to China to inspect the unruly Yangtze River travels up through the river’s gorges searching for dam sites. Pulled on a junk hauled by forty-odd trackers, he is carried, too, into the settled, ancient way of life of the people of the Yangtze — until the interplay of his life with theirs comes to a dramatic climax.Mass market paperback. Later printing. VG+ Child Buyer (1960) The novel is primarily a satire on the school system, although it also posits questions about intelligence, the validity of intelligence/personality tests, and the efficacy of attempts to quantify humanity. One of its major themes is corruption.Alfred A. Knopf, First US edition. NF / NFHamish Hamilton, First UK edition. NF / NF Too Far to Walk (1966) Is there anywhere a young man so dull he would not sell his soul for experience? In this striking new novel, quite different from anything he has written before, John Hersey probes deeply, but with rich humor, into the aimlessness, boredom, and rebellion of a group of undergraduates in a New England college.Clipped dust jacket, now in Brodart. Stated first edition. VG+ / VG+ Under the Eye of the Storm (1967) Two married couples aboard a small boat are besieged by a hurricane. The owner, Dr. Tom Medlar, a liver specialist disenchanted with his healing art, has weekend guests with him on the Harmony. Flicker Hamden, a crack computer-think-man, is inclined to see everything in terms of programming potential, even the mystique of sail, which is heresy to the fussy, meticulous Medlar.Stated first edition. NF / NF Letter to the Alumni (1970) He wrote this letter in response to the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut and the sociopolitical turmoil gripping the United States at the time during the Civil Rights movement. Stated first edition NF / NF The Conspiracy (1972) Nero’s secret police believe they have come on the first hints of a plot against the emperor’s life. Once a promising and gifted friend of poets, pupil of the great Seneca, Nero has bloodied himself and grown fat on power. Crass, mediocre men–the military & the secret police–now have his ear. While he and his court give themselves to pleasures increasingly perverse & dissipated, the secret police close in on the conspiracy of the men of letters.Alfred A. Knopf, First US edition. NF / NFHamish Hamilton, First UK edition. NF / NF
Offered for Sale by: Genesee Books -
Signed first edition of Angela Davis's essays
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Culture, & Politics
$400.00Random House: New York, 1989. First edition, first printing with number line down to 2 and “First Edition” appearing, consistent with Random House’s designation protocols. Signed and dated by Davis on the title page. Boards slightly bowed, otherwise fine in a fine dust wrapper.
Offered for Sale by: The Accidental Bookseller -
SCARCE INSCRIBED FIRST EDITION
Brooks, Gwendolyn. IN THE MECCA.
$850.00New York: Harper & Row, (1968) First printing. Sixth collection of poetry by this Pulitzer prize winning author. The title of this book refers to a huge decaying apartment building in Chicago’s ghetto – the setting for the long title poem. INSCRIBED on the half title page and signed “affectionately, Gwen.” 54 pp. Â Very near fine in red boards in a near fine dust jacket (a very attractive copy with some toning to the dj, original price of $4.95 still present on flap).
Offered for Sale by: Bookfever.com
