skip to main content

Catalog 126, A

NOTE: This page is from our catalog archives. The listings are from an older catalog and are on our website for reference purposes only. If you see something you're interested in, please check our inventory via the search box at upper right or our search page.
1. ABBEY, Edward. Correspondence. 1968-69, 1983. Five letters total: three typed letters signed and two autograph letters signed, written to Ralph Newcomb [Jan. 22, 1968: "I'm sure you realize that any resemblance between Ralph Newcomb and an utterly fictitious creation named 'Ralph Newcomb' in Solitaire is absolutely coincidental, unpremeditated, unintended and quite adventitious."]. In this first letter, Abbey is in Tucson "trying to write a final and absolute masterpiece..." and in the grip of one of his "periodic fits of melancholia," contemplating both suicide and going to British Columbia to escape the war in Vietnam. He writes to Newcomb: "You are still one of the three, maybe four, persons I like most," appending in holograph "(Including females!)." Plant drawing in margin; folded for mailing; fine, with envelope. January 21, 1969, Abbey writes an autograph letter from Arizona where he is counting bobcats and Oregon snowbirds for the Park Service, which "invulnerable to all insult, persists in offering me employment goddammit, nursing this viper in its bosom. (God will punish me.)" He asks Newcomb to write "what's new and all over again what is old and excellent." Handmade letterhead of "Organfeeler Natural Orgasm Nat'l Martyrmint;" folded for mailing; fine, with envelope. In April of that year Abbey is employed as fire lookout on the Grand Canyon's north rim and berates Newcomb for contemplating an academic life: "...DRUDGERY, drudgery, tedium and horror, not to mention the continual sexual frustration of having all those goddamned little coeds, essentially untouchable, flipping their tails in my face all day. Maddening. Agonizing." He is still writing a novel and "reviews and articles now and then. Nothing more. Unprintable poems." Typed, foxed, folded for mailing; near fine, with envelope. January 15, 1983: in two typed pages, Abbey summarizes the 17 years since their last meeting, including making his peace with "Old Mother Death" after his false diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, the goings-on of his parents and children, his marriages, old friends, and his writing. Folded for mailing, slight creasing, else fine, with envelope. Lastly, from July of 1983, is a handwritten letter explaining the logistics of why he never visited and invites Newcomb to the Southwest. Folded for mailing; fine, with envelope. Newcomb appears in Abbey's classic Desert Solitaire, in a long chapter ("Down the River") recounting a rafting trip the two of them took down Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, during the years that Glen Canyon Dam was still under construction. The long-bearded, one-good-legged Newcomb is depicted by Abbey as both an old friend and also as something of an avatar of the wilderness. A nice archive by one of the preeminent American writers in raising consciousness of the environment. For all:

2. ABBEY, Edward. One Life at a Time, Please. NY: Henry Holt (1988). The hardcover issue of this collection of essays. (There was a simultaneous paperback.) Fine in a fine dust jacket.

3. ABBEY, Edward. The Fool's Progress. NY: Holt (1988). His last novel to be published in his lifetime. Fine in a near fine first issue dust jacket ("mist" for "myth" on front flap) with an edge tear on the upper rear flap fold.

4. ALLENDE, Isabel. Of Love and Shadows. NY: Knopf, 1987. The second novel by the expatriate Chilean author of The House of the Spirits. Signed by the author. Fine in a very near fine dust jacket with a slight crimp at the crown.

5. -. Same title. The uncorrected proof copy. Signed by the author. Mildly bumped; near fine in wrappers.

6. ALLENDE, Isabel. The Infinite Plan. (NY): HarperCollins (1993). The advance reading copy of the first American edition of this novel, which is her first to be set in the U.S., although it was published in Spanish, in Spain, first. Signed by the author. Fine in wrappers.

7. ALLENDE, Isabel. Paula. (NY): HarperCollins (1995). The uncorrected proof copy of the first American edition of her first work of nonfiction, a memoir recounted in the context of her daughter's grave illness and untimely death. Signed by the author. Spine and edge-sunning; near fine in wrappers. An uncommon proof.

8. ALLENDE, Isabel. Daughter of Fortune. (NY): HarperCollins (1999). The advance reading copy. Signed by the author. Fine in wrappers.

9. (Anthology). The New Yorker Scrapbook. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1931. "This is a singularly straightforward book, designed to hurt the feelings of all writers not represented in it, without materially adding anything to the happiness of those who are." Included are: Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Wyndham Lewis, Ring Lardner, Morley Callaghan, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, Alexander Woolcott, John O'Hara, Ben Hecht, Robert Nathan, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among many others. Spine- and edge-sunned; one page corner stained; near fine, without dust jacket.

10. (Anthology). Fierce Pajamas. An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker. NY: Random House (2001). The uncorrected proof copy. With work by E.B. White, John Updike, Woody Allen, James Thurber, Donald Barthelme, Ian Frazier, Susan Orlean, Susan Sontag, Garrison Keillor, Peter De Vries, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Calvin Trillin, Steve Martin, S.J. Perelman, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Hall and Martin Amis, among many others. William Shawn story laid in, with hand-correction to table of contents. Covers mildly splayed; else fine in wrappers.

11. (Anthology). War of the Words. NY: Three Rivers Press (2001). The advance reading copy (marked "uncorrected proof") of the 20th anniversary anthology of writings from the Voice Literary Supplement. Includes work by Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Bharati Mukherjee, Dorothy Allison, Jonathan Lethem and many others. Fine in wrappers.

12. (Anthology). Winter. Woodstock: Skylight Paths (2003). Collects previously published work by Barry Lopez, John Updike, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Donald Hall, Jamaica Kincaid, Ron Hansen, E.B. White and others. With illustrations by Barry Moser. Fine in a fine dust jacket.

13. (AUCHINCLOSS, Louis). Three Hundred Years of New York City Families. NY: Wildenstein, 1966. A catalog of an exhibition of "conversation pieces" or family portraits, for which Auchincloss provides a four-page foreword. Auchincloss, a practicing lawyer for over 40 years, is widely considered one of the preeminent chroniclers of the upper crust of New York City, about whom much of his fiction is written. Spine-sunned; near fine in stapled wrappers. An uncommon, ephemeral item.

14. -. Another copy. Spine-sunned, with a few light spots to the spine edge of the front cover; very good in stapled wrappers.

15. AUSTER, Paul. Smoke; Brooklyn Boogie. (n.p.): Babel (1997). French edition of Smoke, Blue in the Face and Augie Wren's Christmas Story. Hint of a crease to the rear panel; else fine in wrappers. First thus, with the title used overseas for Blue in the Face. Introduction by Wayne Wang.

<< Back to Catalog Index