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London : Faber & Faber, (1968). First edition. An extensive selection of letters from Rugby, Italy, Cambridge, Grantchester, Lulworth, Germany, Canada, the South Seas, army camps and the Aegean – charting the whole of Brooke’s short life.
Medium 8vo (25cm). (xvi),(710),[ii]pp. Plates. Portraits. Original light blue cloth, blocked in brown and ruled and lettered in gilt; top edge yellow; a very good copy in the original light blue, white and black dust-jacket – also very good.

£40

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Stroud : Amberley Publishing, (2018). First edition. “How the Dance of the Seven Veils led to ‘the libel case of the century’... A close examination of attitudes to women in the Belle Epoque and beyond”. The sensational life of the dancer Maud Allan (1873-1956).
Medium 8vo (25cm). 287,[i]pp. Plates. Portraits. Original black boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; a very good copy in a very good dust-jacket.

£20

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Manchester : John Heywood, 1895. First edition. The authentic memoirs of the legendary Manchester detective, widely thought to be a model for Sherlock Holmes – an unorthodox policeman who relied on a mastery of disguise as well as a network of informers. The man who solved the Manchester Cab Murder, he became the first Superintendent of the Manchester C.I.D. in 1897. Reminiscences of thieves, card-sharpers, fraudsters, burglars, race-course crooks, bullies and cadgers, bogus railway bonds, confidence tricks, arsonists, anarchists, gambling hells, and much else. A supplementary volume was published at his own expense in 1901.
Demy 8vo (23cm). 464pp. Portrait frontispiece. Illustrations. Original green armorial cloth gilt; top edge gilt; lightly rubbed and a little worn; cloth a little discoloured in places; internally clean and a reasonable copy of a difficult title.

£100

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Edinburgh & London : W. & R. Chambers, 1882. First edition. The autobiography of the distinguished Scottish publisher William Chambers, partner with his brother Robert in “W. & R. Chambers”, founder of “Chambers’s Journal”, “Chambers’s Encyopaedia”, etc. Contains material on many of the leading writers and public figures of the day.
Crown 8vo (19cm). (118)pp. Portrait frontispiece. Original armorial cloth gilt; slightly rubbed and a little sunned; rear endpaper slightly strained; a few creases, but a good copy.

£20

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[London : N. M. Rothschild & Sons,] 1977. First edition. A privately printed monograph to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Nathan Mayer Rothschild – the first of the English Rothschilds. An essay by Chapman concentrating on Rothschild’s early career in England as a textile merchant, 1799-1811.
Imperial 8vo (28cm). [iv],(26),[ii]pp. Folding facsimile frontispiece. Family tree on rear endpapers. Original card wrappers; some minor spotting, but a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket very lightly rubbed and slightly marked.

£20

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London : John Lane, The Bodley Head, (1927). First edition. An elegant life of John Smith of Virginia (1580?-1631), soldier, explorer, admiral, colonial governor, and bestower of the name “New England” – rescue by Pocahontas and all the rest. In the “Golden Hind” series.
Demy 8vo (23cm). (xii),286,[vi]pp. Portrait frontispiece. Plates. Three maps, two folding. Original cloth; some very minor wear and a few marks, but a good and sound copy. Pencilled 1930 gift inscription to A. B. Albright – presumably Alfred Beaumont Albright (1861-1932) of Worcestershire.

£25

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London : Richard Bentley, 1835. First edition. The first full-scale biography of the “Man of Mercury” – Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) – politician, exile, writer, historian, philosopher, libertine and wit – a figure, in the author’s phrase, too long “sedulously erased” from the history books. Included as appendices are Bolingbroke’s poems, the articles of impeachment, his will, etc.
Two volumes. Demy 8vo. xx,416; viii,472pp. Portrait frontispiece to each volume. Bound in a later (early twentieth century) half crimson calf, banded and gilt, by Bayntun; top edges gilt; marbled endpapers; some minor wear and rubbing; spines a little dulled; some sunning to lower covers; preface and contents leaves to vol. i misbound in vol. ii; text a little marked and fingered in places; one leaf slightly damaged, without loss of text; but overall a good set. With the bookplate of William John Robertson in each volume.

£100

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London : Macmillan London, (1990). First edition. “Written in the rinsed-pebble prose of an outstanding man of letters” – the early reminiscences of the author of “Scenes from Provincial Life”.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [iv],(170),[ii]pp. Original maroon boards, lettered on spine in gilt; very good in the Paul Collicut dust-jacket – also very good.

£20

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London : Chatto & Windus, 1960. First edition. Autobiography of the poet and (as Nicholas Blake) crime-writer. “‘You know perfectly well, Cecil, that no poet should ever write his autobiography’. That was W. H. Auden to Cecil Day Lewis just after the war. It is lucky for us Day Lewis disagreed, for The Buried Day impresses both by the beauty of its prose and by its unflinching honesty” (Daily News. 18th May 1960).
Demy 8vo (23cm). (244)pp. Plates. Portraits. Original tan buckram, blocked and lettered in black and gilt; a few minor signs of age and use, but overall a very good copy in the Reynolds Stone dust-jacket – just lightly tanned and slightly spotted, with a chip to rear panel. Contemporary (1961) ownership inscription of Mary Mitchell.

£25

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London : John Murray, (2009). First edition. Signed by Debo Devonshire, the last of the Mitford Sisters, on the title-page. Vignettes and reminiscences, funny, shrewd and moving – both at J. F. Kennedy’s inauguration and at his funeral, at the local post office, the 1938 London season, the Farmers’ Club dinner, book signings, tiaras, auction catalogues, motorways, deportment, Christmas at Chatsworth, shopping as your eyesight begins to fade, and much more. Edited by Charlotte Mosley and with an amusing and affectionate introduction by Alan Bennett, who has also signed the title-page.
Post 8vo (21cm). viii,168pp. Full-page illustrations by Will Topley. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt; pictorial endpapers; very good indeed in the equally very good dust-jacket. Ownership blind stamp of John Connolly in two places.

SOLD

London : Victor Gollancz, 1987. First edition. A weighty biography of one of the most influential publishers and public campaigners of the twentieth century, Victor Gollancz (1893-1967) – “I hate everything that is pro and anti (different peoples). I am only one thing: I am pro-humanity”. With much passing reference to Clement Attlee, Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill, Communism, Daphne du Maurier, Adolf Hitler, the Labour Party, Harold Laski, the Left Book Club, Stanley Morison, George Orwell, Frank Pakenham, etc.
Medium 8vo (24cm). [ii],782pp. Plates, portraits, etc. Original boards; top edge faintly spotted, but a very good copy in the dust-jacket, just slightly nicked and lightly spotted.

£25

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London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1857. First edition. A delightfully extra-illustrated and beautifully bound copy of this still controversial biography of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) – “revolution as well as revelation” in Margaret Oliphant’s phrase. Unsold copies were withdrawn in the face of a storm of legal threat and hostility. Extra-illustrated by the insertion of forty additional plates, portraits and views, a number hand-coloured, as are the original frontispiece portrait and view of Haworth.
Two volumes. Post 8vo (202 x 123mm). viii,352; viii,(328)pp. Engraved frontispieces of Charlotte Brontë (the George Richmond portrait) and Haworth. Facsimile. Extra-illustrated with forty additional engravings, etc. Bound, complete with half-titles, in a handsome later (mid twentieth-century) half black crushed morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers, by George Bayntun of Bath; original cloth bound in a rear; a handful of minor marks and creases; some very mild occasional foxing to the additional plates, with a handful more seriously tanned; slight nick to one inserted plate, but an excellent set. Housed in a matching slip-case.

SOLD

New York : Printed & Published by the Author, 1916. First edition. “I was advised on all hands not to write this book, and some English friends who have read it urge me not to publish it” – Harris’s controversial life of Wilde, reprinted in New York in a trade edition later in 1916, with an apologia by George Bernard Shaw, but not published in the United Kingdom until 1938. A presentation copy, inscribed “To Maud Allan from her friend, the author”, signed in full by Frank Harris, and dated September 1916. Maud Allan (1873-1956) was the internationally famous dancer, best-known for her depiction of Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils, which took London by storm in 1908. Still headlining at the London Pavilion in 1918, she was invited to take the lead in two private performances of Wilde’s still-banned “Salome”. The announcement led to an astounding newspaper piece headed “The Cult of the Clitoris”, which in turn led to a sensational and still controversial Old Bailey libel trial – a trial which spiralled out of control with the accusation that members of the British establishment – not least the trial judge himself – were sexual deviants being blackmailed by Germany to undermine the war effort. The trial, interfered with behind the scenes by both politicians and generals, featured the flamboyant and outspoken aviator and maverick M.P. Noel Pemberton Billing, as well as Wilde’s former lovers and now sworn enemies, Bosie and Robbie Ross – the long-dead Wilde was essentially on trial all over again – and a number of increasingly bizarre witnesses. Allan herself was rumoured to be both the mistress of the late king and the lesbian lover of Margot Asquith, wife of the prime minister at the outbreak of war. Her connection with Harris dated back to his tribute to her in a portfolio titled “The Revival of Classical Dancing : Maud Allan and Her Art” (1908). She is the subject of at least five books – Michael Kettle, “Salome’s Last Veil : The Libel Case of the Century” (1977); Felix Cherniavsky, “The Salome Dancer” (1991); Philip Hoare, “Wilde’s Last Stand” (1997); Russell James, “The Maud Allan Affair” (2008); and Wendy Buonaventura, “Dark Venus : Maud Allan and the Myth of the Femme Fatale” (2018).
Two volumes. Demy 8vo (208 x 134mm). [8],(viii),320; [iv],321-604pp. Plates. Portraits. Facsimile. Bound in an elegant recent full green morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; a few very minor internal marks and tiny flaws; tear to one leaf very expertly repaired, but a handsome set with a compelling history. Loosely inserted are three contemporary postcards featuring Maud Allan at the peak of her fame.

SOLD

London : Gerald Duckworth & Co., (1997). First edition. The story of the sensational libel trial brought against the famous dancer Maud Allan (1873-1956) in 1918, a case which threatened to bring down the British establishment. “This is a story of judges and prejudice, of aesthetes and admirals, of MPs and dancing girls, of sex and conspiracy”.
Medium 8vo (25cm). vi,250pp. Plates. Portraits. Original red boards, lettered in gilt; a very good copy in a just lightly used dust-jacket.

£25

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London : Chatto & Windus, (1988-1992). A complete first edition set of this magisterial biography of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) – the individual volumes sub-titled “The Search for Love : 1856-1898”, “The Pursuit of Power : 1898-1918”, “The Lure of Fantasy : 1918-1950” and “The Shaw Companion” – the last comprising “The Last Laugh : 1950-1992”, as well as the appendices, complete notes, a cumulative index, etc.
Five volumes, bound in four. Medium 8vo (25cm). viii,486,[ii]; (x),422; (x),544,[ii]; viii,490,[vi]pp. Plates. Portraits. Original boards; a very good set in the dust-jackets – the jackets just faintly creased in one or two places.

£100

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London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1981). First British edition. A biography of the extraordinary and "very odd" archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941).
Medium 8vo (24cm). x,278pp. Plates. Portraits. Original boards; a very good copy in a very good dust-jacket.

£25

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London : Hodder & Stoughton (A John Curtis Book), (1994), First edition. A well-illustrated and definitive life of Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1956), born to poverty in a log-cabin in Wisconsin, founder of the pharmaceutical combine, introducer of medicine in tablet form from his factory in Wandsworth, researcher, explorer, collector of books and artefacts, founder of the Wellcome Trust, the Wellcome Library, the Wellcome Collection, philanthropist, archaeologist, and much else.
Medium 8vo (237 x 152mm). (xx),422pp. Plates (some coloured). Portraits. Illustrations. Bound in a stylish contemporarary full green morocco, lettered in gilt, and housed in a matching morocco slip-case. A fine copy.

£125

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Barnsley : Remember When, (2008). First edition. “Exotic dancer Maud Allan saves the London Olympics from certain failure. 90,000 people fill the previously empty stadium to see the biggest celebrity of the day ... Standing beside her was her lover, the PM’s wife Margot Asquith”. The story of the sensational libel trial brought against the famous dancer Maud Allan (1873-1956) in 1918, a case which threatened to bring down the British establishment.
Medium 8vo (25cm). 480pp. Plates. Portraits. Original black boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; a very good copy in a just faintly used dust-jacket.

£25

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London : Jonathan Cape, (1955). First edition : the trade issue. Lawrence of Arabia on his time spent pseudonymously in the R.A.F. – “I wrote it tightly, because our clothes are so tight, and our lives so tight in the service. There is no freedom of conduct at all ... I wanted to bring out the apartness of us”.
Crown 4to (26cm). [ii],206pp. Original blue buckram, blocked in gilt and blind, and lettered in gilt; top edge blue; some spotting of endpapers, but otherwise a very good, bright and sound copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket with a few faint marks, but also very good.

£100

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Tehran : Amate Press, 1973. First edition. Loosely inserted is a 1979 typed invoice on Low’s distinctive Emmington Chinnor notepaper, designed by Reynolds Stone, for three copies of the book, with a genial additional five-line typed message noting that an American bookseller was already charging $20 for signed copies, but that “I still have a few hundred left for the 3,000 printed”. Reminiscences of the well-known antiquarian bookseller – recollections of bookshops in London, Scotland, Ireland and France from the 1920s onwards, memories of many booksellers and collectors, and with brief accounts of both Peter Kroger and Count Potocki of Montalk. With an introduction by Graham Greene – “I don’t know how Freud would have interpreted them, but for more than thirty years my happiest dreams have been of second-hand bookshops”.
Demy 8vo (23cm). (xviii),118pp. Frontispiece by Hanslip Fletcher. Plates. Portraits. Facsimiles. Original terracotta cloth, lettered in gilt; top edge terracotta; orange endpapers, a very good copy in the dust-jacket by Nicolas Bentley – jacket just a touch sunned but also very good.

£40

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London : Ivor Nicholson & Watson, [1932]. First edition. Essays by various well-chosen hands on forty Victorians – including Edmund Blunden on Matthew Arnold, Rebecca West on Charlotte Bronte, G. K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens, Neville Cardus on W. G. Grace, Laurence Housman on Florence Nightingale, Hugh Walpole on Anthony Trollope, etc.
Demy 8vo (23cm). xx,556pp. Original orange cloth; just a touch sunned and faintly bruised; a few slight marks, but othrwise a very good copy. Ex-libris label inscribed J. Hornby and dated 1932.

£20

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New York : Gemini Smith / Playboy Press, (1971). First edition. The richly illustrated life and times of a much-banned author — writing, painting, California, Paris, childhood — “Today’s naked generation has learned nearly everything from him — everything, that is to say, except his bookishness, his capacity for recapturing innocence, his sense of wonder, his sense of words ... Miller talking his life instead of writing it (he has written it already) ... Durrell thinks that Miller’s lifework is the best confessional writing since Rousseau. He is probably right” (Anthony Burgess in the New York Times, 2nd January 1972).
Foolscap folio (32cm). (208)pp. Photographs, portraits and illustrations throughout, some in colour. Original navy cloth, lettered in gilt; a very good, bright and clean copy in the Bradley Smith / Nicole de Jurenev dust-jacket — the jacket also very good, with just very minor edge-wear.

£100

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London : Williams & Norgate, (1937). First edition. A full-length life and an important reappraisal of this still controversial figure, with Montgomerie’s zealous research revealing Bligh as “a precisian rather than a martinet”, as well as an outstanding navigator and seaman – “one of the mysteries of history, but when lions die the jackals gather” (The Era, 15th April 1937).
Demy 8vo (23cm). [2],xiv,(310),[ii]pp. Plates. Folding diagram and folding chart. Original cloth; just a touch dulled; endpapers tanned; some edge-spots, but a very good and sound copy. Ownership inscription reading Sparks, Deal.

£25

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London : for the Author, by J. Davis, 1787. First edition. The essential source for the life of the remarkable Jonas Hanway (1712-1786), merchant and philanthropist. Actively engaged in the Russia trade, and here, there, and everywhere in the pursuit of good causes, his 1767 Act of Parliament (Hanway’s Act) is regarded as “the only piece of eighteenth-century legislation dealing with the poor which was an unqualified success”. John Pugh had been Hanway’s secretary for a number of years.
Demy 8vo (208 x 130mm). [2],x,262pp. Folding plan of the Caspian, engraved by Samuel John Neele (1758-1824). Bound in a stylish, near contemporary, early nineteenth-century, half black calf, prettily gilt (a pencilled note on the verso of the title suggests that the binding was executed by or for a W. Cheney); marbled sides and edges; binding a touch rubbed at upper joint; map lightly creased; some offsetting to title-page; the occasional mark or spot, but overall a very good copy.

£400

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London : Oxford University Press / Scolar Press, 1975. First edition. A splendid life of Shakespeare, rooted in the documentary evidence, and reproducing in full-size facsimile over 200 of the key documents.
Crown folio (37cm). (xx),(274),[ii]pp. Over 200 facsimiles, some folding. Original cloth; mild spotting of top edge, but a very good copy in the original dust-jacket – price-clipped and a little creased and rumpled under the laminate on the upper panel.

£75

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London : John Murray, (1950-1961). A complete first edition set of the four volumes of Stark’s autobiography – the first volume signed by the author on the half-title. From her picaresque childhood, through her life and travels in the Arab and Persian world, to World War II – “It is difficult to know which to admire more, her vivid description of her experiences or the realism of the lessons which she draws from them ... Our future is uncontrollable if we are unable to read our past” (Sir Charles Petrie in The Illustrated London News, 28th October 1961).
Four volumes. Demy 8vo (23cm). (xiv),346; (xvi),(342),[ii]; (xvi),(288); xii,(298),[ii]pp. Numerous plates – many from the author’s own photographs; portraits; maps, some double-page, etc. Wood-engraved decorations by Reynolds Stone. Original green cloth, lettered in gilt, with facsimiles of the author’s signature on upper covers; the first volume a little faded; some edge-spotting, chiefly to the final volume, but otherwise a very good set in the Frank Quilter dust-jackets – the first price-clipped, a little worn, nicked and chipped, with repairs at head; the second price-clipped, a little chipped, with repaired tears to foot at folds; the third with slight chipping at head and some repaired nicks; the fourth very good, with only a hint of wear. The first volume with the decorative bookplate of Jean A. Callander of Westwood, Falkirk, the third and fourth with unrelated inscriptions.

£500

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New York : Foundation of Thanatology, (1991). First edition. A sensitive study of Sir Henry Clinton (1730-1795) and his wives and descendants. Clinton was a general during the American War of Independence, the son of an admiral and former Governor of New York, and father of further generals. The study concentrates on his emotional life, drawing largely on the rediscovered diary of his first wife Harriot Carter (1747-1772), as well as material from the related Holroyd family.
Medium 4to (28cm). [2],xviii,228pp. Plates. Facsimiles. Original pictorial wrappers; some light wear; and a few faint marks, but otherwise a very good copy.

£30

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London : John Murray, 1917. First edition. An engaging and well-researched life of one Lord Mayor of London – the turbulent and magnificent John Wilkes (1725-1797) – by one of his successors in that office. Duels, the “North Briton”, general warrants, habeas corpus, expulsions from the Commons, the Middlesex elections, the mayoralty and all the rest.
Demy 8vo (23cm). xxxvi,(300)pp. Sixteen plates. Original armorial cloth gilt; some minor wear; a touch dulled; some internal browning and spotting, but a good and sound copy. A 1918 gift inscription is signed by the author’s wife.

£25

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London : Cassell & Co., (1965). First edition. A life of the mercurial Thomas Cochrane (1775-1860) – Nelson’s “Loup de Mer” – brilliant sailor, inventor, politician, naval strategist, radical reformer, rebel, scourge of bureaucrats and liberator of nations – more honoured from Greece to Brazil than in his own country. “His sweeping indictments of injustice and corruption, his impetuous high courage which had stood him so well as a seaman, earned him only a reputation as a troublemaker”.
Demy 8vo (23cm). (xvi),(276)pp. Plates. Portraits. Map. Original boards; a few faint marks, but a very good copy in a just lightly used and slightly tanned dust-jacket, but also very good.

SOLD

London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed with a friendly greeting and signed with forename by the author in July 1971 — the recipient being Edgar S. Brown of Allentown (PA), whom the author singles out for thanks in his foreword, “for his prevailing urgent and American voice across the Atlantic”. Loosely inserted is the address portion of the packaging used to convey the book from London to Pennsylvania. A full-scale biography of “the myopic, paranoiac near genius” Frederick William Rolfe, “Baron Corvo” (1860-1913) — a biography inspired by, but wholly supplanting, A. J. A. Symons’ “The Quest for Corvo” (1934).
Demy 8vo (23cm). (xl),(450)pp. Plates. Portraits. Original brown boards, ruled and lettered in gilt; a couple of light marks, but a very good copy in the John Riley dust-jacket — the jacket with some very minor wear at head and corners, but also very good. Ownership inscription and mark in the text against his name by Edgar S. Brown.

£50

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