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The Third Policeman -
Flann O'Brien
1967 - Walker and Company, New York - First American Edition
‘The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe, " he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.
The last of O’Brien’s novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O’Brien’s other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, and The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland’s great comic geniuses.’ [blurb from later publisher]
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Price HK$ 2,200
1967 - Walker and Company, New York - First American Edition
‘The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe, " he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O’Brien’s novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O’Brien’s other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, and The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland’s great comic geniuses.’ [blurb from later publisher]
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Price HK$ 2,200
The Paper Chase -
John Jay Osborn
1971 - Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston - First Edition
John Jay Osborn’s ‘Paper Chase’ is the story of a young midwesterner, James Hart, who finds himself in the great classrooms of Langdell Hall at Harvard Law School, locked in a zero-sum game with a dominating, omniscient deity: Professor Kingsfield. Osborn wrote this, his first novel, whilst studying at Harvard Law School. It was made into a movie starring John Houseman and Timothy Bottoms. Houseman won an Oscar for his performance as contracts professor Kingsfield, it was also turned into a television series.
Included with this copy is the HUL (News Notes of the Harvard University Library) dated September 1971, it contains a rather critical review of the novel.
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Price HK$ 3,200
1971 - Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston - First Edition
John Jay Osborn’s ‘Paper Chase’ is the story of a young midwesterner, James Hart, who finds himself in the great classrooms of Langdell Hall at Harvard Law School, locked in a zero-sum game with a dominating, omniscient deity: Professor Kingsfield. Osborn wrote this, his first novel, whilst studying at Harvard Law School. It was made into a movie starring John Houseman and Timothy Bottoms. Houseman won an Oscar for his performance as contracts professor Kingsfield, it was also turned into a television series.Included with this copy is the HUL (News Notes of the Harvard University Library) dated September 1971, it contains a rather critical review of the novel.
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Price HK$ 3,200
After Claude -
Iris Owens
1973 - Farrar, New York - First Edition
Rare in first edition, even more so in dust jacket, and here you have a fine and signed first edition.
Cult classic and the first of only two books published under the author’s own name. The rest of her career was spent writing pornography as ‘Harriet Daimler’ for the Olympia Press in Paris.
‘After Claude’ features Harriet one of the first anti-heroines, it is ‘a foulmouthed comic tour de force, still capable of offending the offendable and casting a blue-streaked spell of hilarity over everyone else.’ [Gerald Howard]
There is too much written about Iris Owens and ‘After Claude’ to do either justice in this short note, below are a few short reviews, and extracts from articles.
‘If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss.’
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Price HK$ 7,900
1973 - Farrar, New York - First Edition
Rare in first edition, even more so in dust jacket, and here you have a fine and signed first edition.Cult classic and the first of only two books published under the author’s own name. The rest of her career was spent writing pornography as ‘Harriet Daimler’ for the Olympia Press in Paris.
‘After Claude’ features Harriet one of the first anti-heroines, it is ‘a foulmouthed comic tour de force, still capable of offending the offendable and casting a blue-streaked spell of hilarity over everyone else.’ [Gerald Howard]
There is too much written about Iris Owens and ‘After Claude’ to do either justice in this short note, below are a few short reviews, and extracts from articles.
‘If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss.’
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Price HK$ 7,900
The Oldest Inhabitant. A Comedy -
Eden Phillpotts
1934 - The Macmillan Company, New York - First American Edition
A fine first edition in fine dust jacket.
A plot based in a small Devonshire village, and centred around one of it’s oldest residents, a sly old scamp and about whom his oldest friend says “a artfully and more utterly devious and downy old man than he is don’t draw breath”...
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Price HK$ 1,800
1934 - The Macmillan Company, New York - First American Edition
A fine first edition in fine dust jacket.A plot based in a small Devonshire village, and centred around one of it’s oldest residents, a sly old scamp and about whom his oldest friend says “a artfully and more utterly devious and downy old man than he is don’t draw breath”...
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Price HK$ 1,800
Johnson Over Jordan - The Play. And All About It (An Essay) -
J. B. Priestley
1939 - William Heinemann Ltd, London - First Edition
‘J.B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century. And it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius’ – Dame Judi Dench
A smartly bound copy of J.B. Priestley’s ‘adventure in theatre’, Johnson Over Jordan – the story of ‘everyman’ Robert Johnson who attempts to make sense of a life half lived – was the play he considered his finest and most ambitious achievement. Also features an essay by Priestly on the writing of the play and its origins, and the critical reception of the stage production.
Illustrated with 8 full page black and white photographic plates of the original 1939 stage production, which starred Ralph Richardson and featured a musical score by Benjamin Britten.
With a black and white photographic portrait of the playwright tipped in to front endpaper and the front panel of the original dust jacket laid in.
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Price HK$ 1,500
1939 - William Heinemann Ltd, London - First Edition
‘J.B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century. And it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius’ – Dame Judi DenchA smartly bound copy of J.B. Priestley’s ‘adventure in theatre’, Johnson Over Jordan – the story of ‘everyman’ Robert Johnson who attempts to make sense of a life half lived – was the play he considered his finest and most ambitious achievement. Also features an essay by Priestly on the writing of the play and its origins, and the critical reception of the stage production.
Illustrated with 8 full page black and white photographic plates of the original 1939 stage production, which starred Ralph Richardson and featured a musical score by Benjamin Britten.
With a black and white photographic portrait of the playwright tipped in to front endpaper and the front panel of the original dust jacket laid in.
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Price HK$ 1,500
The Crying of Lot 49 -
Thomas Pynchon
1966 - J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia New York - First Edition
The first edition in which Pynchon, the man who turned paranoia into a literary style, plays with us....
‘Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating….Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what else besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about....Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.’
‘The comedy crackles, the puns pop the satire explodes.’ – New York Times.
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Price HK$ 7,000
1966 - J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia New York - First Edition
The first edition in which Pynchon, the man who turned paranoia into a literary style, plays with us....‘Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating….Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what else besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about....Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.’
‘The comedy crackles, the puns pop the satire explodes.’ – New York Times.
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Price HK$ 7,000
The Jungle -
Upton Sinclair
1906 - Doubleday, New York - First Edition
‘Pierces the thickest skull and most leathery heart.’ - Winston Churchill
‘The brutally grim story of a Slavic family who emigrates to America, The Jungle tells of their rapid and inexorable descent into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and social and economic despair.
‘Sinclair's nightmarish narrative of the immigrant Rudken family instigated a series of legislative measures that were highly successful. His lurid scenes of a meat packing industry that ground both rates and fingers into sausage aroused the middle class to demand sanitary conditions for food preparation.
Yet far less effective by comparison was his severe indictment of the working conditions that regularly reduced laborers to impoverished insanity. As Sinclair later wryly observed, “I aimed for the heart and hit the stomach of America”.’ – Emory Elliot, The Columbia Literary History of the United States.
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Price HK$ 9,400
1906 - Doubleday, New York - First Edition
‘Pierces the thickest skull and most leathery heart.’ - Winston Churchill‘The brutally grim story of a Slavic family who emigrates to America, The Jungle tells of their rapid and inexorable descent into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and social and economic despair.
‘Sinclair's nightmarish narrative of the immigrant Rudken family instigated a series of legislative measures that were highly successful. His lurid scenes of a meat packing industry that ground both rates and fingers into sausage aroused the middle class to demand sanitary conditions for food preparation.
Yet far less effective by comparison was his severe indictment of the working conditions that regularly reduced laborers to impoverished insanity. As Sinclair later wryly observed, “I aimed for the heart and hit the stomach of America”.’ – Emory Elliot, The Columbia Literary History of the United States.
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Price HK$ 9,400
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West -
Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto
1954 - Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston - First Edition
A fine first edition of Wallace Stegner’s epic work, with an introduction by Bernard DeVoto.
With a large folding panoramic frontispiece painting of the Grand Canyon by William H. Holmes, and illustrated throughout from engravings, paintings, sketches, maps, and photographs.
Stegner recounts the successes and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest.
‘This book goes far beyond biography, into the nature and soul of the American West. It is Stegner at his best, assaying an entire era of our history, packing his pages with insights as shrewd as his prose.’ – Ivan Doig.
‘Wallace Stegner ... has summarized the frontier story and interpreted it as only one who was a part of it could do. The result is a memorable and rewarding book.’ – Hal Borland, New York Times Book Review.
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Price HK$ 4,500
1954 - Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston - First Edition
A fine first edition of Wallace Stegner’s epic work, with an introduction by Bernard DeVoto.With a large folding panoramic frontispiece painting of the Grand Canyon by William H. Holmes, and illustrated throughout from engravings, paintings, sketches, maps, and photographs.
Stegner recounts the successes and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest.
‘This book goes far beyond biography, into the nature and soul of the American West. It is Stegner at his best, assaying an entire era of our history, packing his pages with insights as shrewd as his prose.’ – Ivan Doig.
‘Wallace Stegner ... has summarized the frontier story and interpreted it as only one who was a part of it could do. The result is a memorable and rewarding book.’ – Hal Borland, New York Times Book Review.
More details
Price HK$ 4,500