Drama & Poetry

FIRST EDITION, hardcover issue, SIGNED BY MAMET on dedication page. Winner of the 1976 Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of 1977; made into a 1996 film starring Dustin Hoffman. Octavo, original yellow cloth, original dust jacket; custom half-morocco box. A FINE COPY.

FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF AESCHYLUS. With the editio princeps of the Agamemnon. “An excellent and beautiful edition… It is a much more valuable impression than either of its precursors.. what enhances the value of the edition is, that the Agamemnon is published in it, for the first time, complete.” -Dibdin, An introduction to the knowledge of rare and valuable editions of the Greek and Latin Classics Quarto. Early full tree-calf skillfully rebacked, spine in six compartments, red leather label. Gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Text generallly clean throughout; repaired tear to the lower portion of title page. A handsome copy of an important and distinguished edition.

FIRST UK EDITION, translated from the French by Beckett. “Voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century in a British Royal National Theatre poll of 800 playwrights, actors, directors and journalists… Beckett’s naked play about two tramps waiting for Godot has tapped into our 20th-century public consciousness. It seems to express our deepest fears and our deepest knowledge of ourselves and our predicament” (Norman Berlin). “The first production of Beckett’s own English translation, directed by Peter Hall, was staged at the Arts Theatre Club in London in August 1955. Kenneth Tynan’s and Harold Hobson’s reviews made it into an intellectual hit which has since been regarded as having transformed the British stage” (Dictionary of National Biography). Preceded by the first edition (1952, in French) and the first American edition (1954). Octavo, original mustard cloth, original dust jacket. Book near-fine with slight lean; dust jacket with light edgewear, toning to top of rear panel.

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY WHITMAN. “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free”, before becoming the final addition to the final edition of Leaves of Grass, was published independently by Whitman in 1872, twenty years before the poet’s death. The title poem was written as a commencement for Dartmouth College as one of the few pieces Whitman recited publicly. With large Whitman signature across title page. Octavo, original dark green cloth; custom half-morocco box. Minor discoloration to pastedowns. a little fraying to spine ends and corners.

DEDICATION COPY OF SNYDER’S FIRST BOOK, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY SNYDER: “For Jim Baxtor / from Gary”. Baxtor is one of 12 dedicatees. Octavo, original wrappers, Japanese string tied binding. One of only 500 copies. Fine

SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION of Yeats’s autobiographical work; one of only 1000 copies signed by Yeats. “Looking back from 1922, [Yeats] titled his autobiographical account of the decade of the 1890s The Trembling of the Veil. He recalled that Mallarme has said that ‘his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple,’ and that ‘as those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book,’ he had named it accordingly” (The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats). Octavo, original half parchment over light green boards; original dust jacket. Dust jacket spine with light wear at the spine (slightly affecting label) and minor toning. A FINE COPY in the scarce original dust jacket.

SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY ALLEN GINSBERG, WITH SUNFLOWER DRAWING. A later printing of Ginsberg’s masterpiece. “In October 1955 Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem [‘Howl’] in public for the first time to tumultuous applause at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco with the local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald the reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they labeled the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Book Store and the City Lights publishing house in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?’ Later Ginsberg wrote that ‘in publishing ‘Howl,’ I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy’ (Original Draft Facsimile Howl, p. xii). Very nearly fine with only the most trivial wear to extremities.

FIRST KELMSCOTT PRESS EDITION, ONE OF ONLY 250 COPIES ON PAPER (from an edition of 258). The Kelmscott Press “was far and away the most splendid of all private presses… quite without a peer.” -Colin Franklin, The Private Presses Beautifully printed in red and black in Golden type. Exquisitely illustrated by William Morris with woodcut title page, first page (borders), and decorated initials throughout.  Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1895 [issued 1896]. Small quarto, original limp vellum, yapp edges, gilt spine title, green silk ties; uncut. One tie loose, else fine.