The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit -
Charles DIckens, Hablot Knight Browne “Phiz” (illustrator)
1844 - Chapman and Hall, London - First Edition
A handsomely bound first edition of Dickens’ satirical comedy of hypocrisy, selfishness, and greed, the picaresque story of young Martin Chuzzlewit who, together with the scheming architect Pecksniff, journeys to America to seek his fortune.
With 39 engraved plates and engraved title page vignette by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz").
‘Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well drest’.
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Price HK$ 12,000
1844 - Chapman and Hall, London - First Edition
A handsomely bound first edition of Dickens’ satirical comedy of hypocrisy, selfishness, and greed, the picaresque story of young Martin Chuzzlewit who, together with the scheming architect Pecksniff, journeys to America to seek his fortune.With 39 engraved plates and engraved title page vignette by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz").
‘Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well drest’.
More details
Price HK$ 12,000
Our Mutual Friend -
Charles DIckens, Marcus Stone (illustrator)
1865 - Chapman and Hall, London - First Edition
Handsomely bound first edition of Charles Dickens’s last complete novel and a glorious satire spanning all levels of Victorian society. Illustrated with forty engraved plates by Marcus Stone.
‘Our Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance – Old Harmon’s profitable dust heaps – and its legatees, young John Harmon, presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the River Thames, and kindly dustman Mr Boffin, to whom the fortune defaults. With brilliant satire, Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. The novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and the corrupting power of money’.
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Price HK$ 10,000
1865 - Chapman and Hall, London - First Edition
Handsomely bound first edition of Charles Dickens’s last complete novel and a glorious satire spanning all levels of Victorian society. Illustrated with forty engraved plates by Marcus Stone.‘Our Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance – Old Harmon’s profitable dust heaps – and its legatees, young John Harmon, presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the River Thames, and kindly dustman Mr Boffin, to whom the fortune defaults. With brilliant satire, Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. The novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and the corrupting power of money’.
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Price HK$ 10,000
The Four Quartets: Burnt Norton; East Coker; The Dry Salvages; Little Gidding -
T.S. Eliot
1941 - Faber and Faber, London - First Editions
Four first editions of what Eliot himself considered to be his finest work finely bound into one volume, housed in a matching custom slipcase.
‘Four Quartets’ is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in ’The Waste Land’. First published individually from 1936 to 1942. Here, in four linked poems (’Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘Little Gidding’), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man many feel to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’ – Burnt Norton
‘In my beginning is my end.’ – East Coker
‘I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown gold – sullen, untamed and intractable...’ – Dry Salvages
‘Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.’ – Little Gidding
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Price HK$ 8,000
1941 - Faber and Faber, London - First Editions
Four first editions of what Eliot himself considered to be his finest work finely bound into one volume, housed in a matching custom slipcase.‘Four Quartets’ is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in ’The Waste Land’. First published individually from 1936 to 1942. Here, in four linked poems (’Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘Little Gidding’), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man many feel to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’ – Burnt Norton
‘In my beginning is my end.’ – East Coker
‘I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown gold – sullen, untamed and intractable...’ – Dry Salvages
‘Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.’ – Little Gidding
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Price HK$ 8,000
The Great Gatsby -
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925 - Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York - First Edition, First Issue
‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
An elegantly bound first edition of this landmark of 20th century fiction, and the epitome of the Jazz Age in American literature, which incredibly, sold very little during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.
‘I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited – they went there.’
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Price HK$ 38,000
1925 - Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York - First Edition, First Issue
‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’An elegantly bound first edition of this landmark of 20th century fiction, and the epitome of the Jazz Age in American literature, which incredibly, sold very little during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.
‘I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited – they went there.’
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Price HK$ 38,000
Flying Colours. Including A Ship Of The Line -
C. S. Forester
1938 - Michael Joseph Ltd. in conjunction with The Book Society Ltd., London - First Edition
One finely bound volume containing two classic Hornblower novels, in which Captain Horatio Hornblower commands his first ship of the line, HMS Sutherland. A Ship Of The Line and Flying Colours, are the second and third books in the Horatio Hornblower series. This is the first publication of Flying Colours which was released shortly afterwards as a stand alone title, making this the true first edition.
A Ship of the Line - May 1810, seventeen years deep into the Napoleonic Wars. Captain Horatio Hornblower is newly in command of his first ship of the line, the seventy-four-gun HMS Sutherland, which he deems ‘the ugliest and least desirable two-decker in the Navy List’. Moreover, she is 250 men short of a full crew, so Hornblower must enlist and train ‘poachers, bigamists, sheepstealers’, and other landlubbers. By the time the Sutherland reaches the blockaded Catalonian coast of Spain, the crew is capable of staging five astonishing solo raids against the French. But the grisly prospect of defeat and capture looms for both captain and crew as the Sutherland single-handedly takes on four French ships.
Flying Colours - Forced to surrender the Sutherland after a long and bloody battle, Captain Horatio Hornblower now bides his time as a prisoner in a French fortress. Within days he and his first lieutenant, Bush, who was crippled in the last fight, are to be taken to Paris to be tried on trumped-up charges of violating the laws of war, and most probably executed as part of Napoleon's attempt to rally the war-weary empire behind him. Even if Hornblower escapes this fate and somehow finds his way back to England, he will face court-martial for his surrender of a British ship. As fears for his life and his reputation compete in his mind with worries about his pregnant wife and his possibly widowed lover, the indomitable captain impatiently awaits the chance to make his next move.
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Price HK$ 5,000
1938 - Michael Joseph Ltd. in conjunction with The Book Society Ltd., London - First Edition
One finely bound volume containing two classic Hornblower novels, in which Captain Horatio Hornblower commands his first ship of the line, HMS Sutherland. A Ship Of The Line and Flying Colours, are the second and third books in the Horatio Hornblower series. This is the first publication of Flying Colours which was released shortly afterwards as a stand alone title, making this the true first edition.A Ship of the Line - May 1810, seventeen years deep into the Napoleonic Wars. Captain Horatio Hornblower is newly in command of his first ship of the line, the seventy-four-gun HMS Sutherland, which he deems ‘the ugliest and least desirable two-decker in the Navy List’. Moreover, she is 250 men short of a full crew, so Hornblower must enlist and train ‘poachers, bigamists, sheepstealers’, and other landlubbers. By the time the Sutherland reaches the blockaded Catalonian coast of Spain, the crew is capable of staging five astonishing solo raids against the French. But the grisly prospect of defeat and capture looms for both captain and crew as the Sutherland single-handedly takes on four French ships.
Flying Colours - Forced to surrender the Sutherland after a long and bloody battle, Captain Horatio Hornblower now bides his time as a prisoner in a French fortress. Within days he and his first lieutenant, Bush, who was crippled in the last fight, are to be taken to Paris to be tried on trumped-up charges of violating the laws of war, and most probably executed as part of Napoleon's attempt to rally the war-weary empire behind him. Even if Hornblower escapes this fate and somehow finds his way back to England, he will face court-martial for his surrender of a British ship. As fears for his life and his reputation compete in his mind with worries about his pregnant wife and his possibly widowed lover, the indomitable captain impatiently awaits the chance to make his next move.
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Price HK$ 5,000
An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard -
Thomas Gray
1869 - Sampson Low, London
‘Full many a Gem of purest Ray serene
The dark unfathom'd Caves of Ocean Bear:
Full many a Flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its Sweetness on the desert Air.’
A finely bound and illustrated edition of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, one of the most widely-quoted poems of the 18th century. It is a meditation on the inevitability of death; the vanity of ambition and the universal human desire to be loved. In particular the poem looks at death as a leveller, an indiscriminate force which makes no distinction between the famous on the one hand and, on the other, the anonymous – those who, in the words of the poem:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray
‘Widely considered his masterpiece, it is believed that Gray wrote the 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' in the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire in 1751. The poem was a literary sensation when published by Robert Dodsley in February 1751 and has made a lasting contribution to English literature’
With sixteen colour chromolithograph illustrations from drawings by R. Barnes, R. P. Leitch, E. M. Wimperis and others, each with descriptive tissue guards, and two leaves of the original manuscript in facsimile.
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Price HK$ 9,000
1869 - Sampson Low, London
‘Full many a Gem of purest Ray sereneThe dark unfathom'd Caves of Ocean Bear:
Full many a Flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its Sweetness on the desert Air.’
A finely bound and illustrated edition of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, one of the most widely-quoted poems of the 18th century. It is a meditation on the inevitability of death; the vanity of ambition and the universal human desire to be loved. In particular the poem looks at death as a leveller, an indiscriminate force which makes no distinction between the famous on the one hand and, on the other, the anonymous – those who, in the words of the poem:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray
‘Widely considered his masterpiece, it is believed that Gray wrote the 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' in the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire in 1751. The poem was a literary sensation when published by Robert Dodsley in February 1751 and has made a lasting contribution to English literature’
With sixteen colour chromolithograph illustrations from drawings by R. Barnes, R. P. Leitch, E. M. Wimperis and others, each with descriptive tissue guards, and two leaves of the original manuscript in facsimile.
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Price HK$ 9,000
Les Livres de L'Enfance du XVe au XIXe Siecle. Preface de Paul Gavault -
Gumuchian
1930 - Gumuchian & Compagnie, Paris - The first deluxe edition, limited to 100 copies on Papier de Hollande, this being number 10
Possibly the most important catalogue of children's books ever Issued. Two large quarto volumes, text in French and English, illustrated with 336 colour and black and white plates.
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Price HK$ 6,000
1930 - Gumuchian & Compagnie, Paris - The first deluxe edition, limited to 100 copies on Papier de Hollande, this being number 10
Possibly the most important catalogue of children's books ever Issued. Two large quarto volumes, text in French and English, illustrated with 336 colour and black and white plates.
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Price HK$ 6,000
Robertson of Irvine - Poet-Preacher -
Arthur Guthrie
1890 - Ardrossan, London - Second Edition
A finely bound copy, illustrated with engraved frontispiece portrait and calotype plate of Trinity Church, Irvine from a photograph.
William Bruce Robertson (1820-86), Scottish divine, was born at Greenhill, St. Ninians, Stirling, 24 May, 1820, and was educated at the University of Glasgow and at the Secession Theological Hall, Edinburgh, where he made the acquaintance of Thomas de Quincey, and on his recommendation went to the University of Halle and studied under Friedrich Tholuck.
After travelling in Italy and Switzerland he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Stirling and Falkirk in 1843, and was soon after ordained at the United Secession Church (after 1847, the United Presbyterian Church) in Irvine, Ayrshire. In this charge he remained for 35 years, exercising from his pulpit a truly magnetic influence.’
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Price HK$ 1,500
1890 - Ardrossan, London - Second Edition
A finely bound copy, illustrated with engraved frontispiece portrait and calotype plate of Trinity Church, Irvine from a photograph.William Bruce Robertson (1820-86), Scottish divine, was born at Greenhill, St. Ninians, Stirling, 24 May, 1820, and was educated at the University of Glasgow and at the Secession Theological Hall, Edinburgh, where he made the acquaintance of Thomas de Quincey, and on his recommendation went to the University of Halle and studied under Friedrich Tholuck.
After travelling in Italy and Switzerland he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Stirling and Falkirk in 1843, and was soon after ordained at the United Secession Church (after 1847, the United Presbyterian Church) in Irvine, Ayrshire. In this charge he remained for 35 years, exercising from his pulpit a truly magnetic influence.’
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Price HK$ 1,500