East of Eden by Steinbeck, John (1902-1968) - 1952

[i-viii]+[1]+301+[302-04] pages. Octavo (8" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's red cloth with gilt title and author's name on spine and embossed "SL" on cover in original jacket. (Pastore: 251) First state, limited to 10,000 copies with title page 1/4 inch shorter at bottom than surrounding leaves, corrected in later print run. Lewis had commented to several parties privately that Doubleday, Doran was putting too much focus on the Nobel Prize and too little on him. Word reached the publisher and the result was the addition of Lewis's initials to the olive branch motif on the cover of this and subsequent novels. The novel in an attack on the Communist left as a response the way It can't Happen Here was an attack on the totalitarian right; it deals with the "generation gap" and was soundly criticized by Lewis's former socialistic associates, Upton Sinclair, in particular, who vied the book as an apologia for middle-class values and mores, those same values and mores which Lewis had so well… Read More

316+[6 ad] pages. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's black cloth with silver lettering to spine and cover in original jacket. Has the "A" on the title verso. First edition. Wright wrote as a critic and journalist until 1923, when he became ill from what was given out as overwork, but was in reality a secret drug addiction, according to John Loughery's biography Alias S.S. Van Dine. His doctor confined him to bed (supposedly because of a heart ailment, but actually because of a cocaine addiction) for more than two years. In frustration and boredom, he began collecting and studying thousands of volumes of crime and detection. In 1926 this paid off with the publication of his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright took his pseudonym from the abbreviation of "steamship" and from Van Dine, which he claimed was an old family name. Wright wrote a series of short stories for Warner Brothers film studio in the early 1930s. These stories were used as the basis for a… Read More

vii[1]+240+4 ad pages, frontispiece and seven plates. Small Octavo (7 1/2" x 5") Bound in red cloth with black ship's wheel decoration on front cover boarder by two black bands black lettering, Decoration (sailboat with seagulls) on spine and lettering in gilt. 4378 copies printed. [Inscribed by Becky London] London's second daughter to his first wife. [Sisson & Marten's 103] First edition. "I've never written a line that I'd be ashamed for my young daughters to read, and I never shall write such a line!" Thus Jack London, well along in his career. And thus almost any collection of his adventure stories is acceptable to young readers as well as to their elders. So, in sorting over the few manuscripts still unpublished in book form, while most of them were written primarily for boys and girls, I do not hesitate to include as appropriate a tale such as "Whose Business Is to Live." Condition: Becky London's inscription on front end paper, Corners gently bumped and rubbed, spine ends gently rubbed.… Read More

298 pages. Small octavo (7 1/2" x 5 1/4") bound in green cloth with dark green lettering to cover and spine in original pictorial jacket. (First's January 2003 pg 45) First American edition. The Luck of the Bodkins first published in the United Kingdom on October 11, 1935 by Herbert Jenkins, and in the United States on January 3, 1936 by Little, Brown and Company. The two editions are significantly different, though the plot remains the same. The novel was serialized in Passing Show magazine (UK) from 21 September to 23 November 1935, and this version was published as the UK edition. For its US magazine appearance, in the Red Book, between August 1935 and January 1936, Wodehouse re-wrote the story, reducing its length, and this became the US book edition. The story concerns the complicated love life of amiable young Drone Monty Bodkin, the nephew of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, who had previously appeared in Heavy Weather (1933), when he was employed as the latest in the long line of Lord Emsworth's… Read More

322 pages. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/4") bound in original publisher's yellow cloth with green lettering and illustration to spine in original pictorial jacket. (Firsts volume 13, number 1, page 46) First American edition.Summer Moonshine is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on October 8, 1937 by Doubleday, Doran, New York, and in the United Kingdom on February 11, 1938 by Herbert Jenkins, London. It was previously serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (US) from 24 July to 11 September 1937 and in Pearson's Magazine (UK) between September 1937 and April 1938. Former big-game hunter Sir Buckstone Abbott, finding himself hard up, takes in paying guests at his pile, Walsingford Hall, while hoping to sell the place to a wealthy Princess. Pretty soon, all kinds of schemes, plots and romantic entanglements are going on. Condition:Light sunning to top edges. Jacket spine sunned, spine ends chipped, some wear with small chips and closed tears to edges else a very good copy in… Read More

[i-viii]+[1]+301+[302-04] pages. Octavo (8" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's red cloth with gilt title and author's name on spine and embossed "SL" on cover in original jacket. (Pastore: 251) First state, limited to 10,000 copies with title page 1/4 inch shorter at bottom than surrounding leaves, corrected in later print run. Lewis had commented to several parties privately that Doubleday, Doran was putting too much focus on the Nobel Prize and too little on him. Word reached the publisher and the result was the addition of Lewis's initials to the olive branch motif on the cover of this and subsequent novels. The novel in an attack on the Communist left as a response the way It can't Happen Here was an attack on the totalitarian right; it deals with the "generation gap" and was soundly criticized by Lewis's former socialistic associates, Upton Sinclair, in particular, who vied the book as an apologia for middle-class values and mores, those same values and mores which Lewis had so well… Read More

316+[6 ad] pages. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's black cloth with silver lettering to spine and cover in original jacket. Has the "A" on the title verso. First edition. Wright wrote as a critic and journalist until 1923, when he became ill from what was given out as overwork, but was in reality a secret drug addiction, according to John Loughery's biography Alias S.S. Van Dine. His doctor confined him to bed (supposedly because of a heart ailment, but actually because of a cocaine addiction) for more than two years. In frustration and boredom, he began collecting and studying thousands of volumes of crime and detection. In 1926 this paid off with the publication of his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright took his pseudonym from the abbreviation of "steamship" and from Van Dine, which he claimed was an old family name. Wright wrote a series of short stories for Warner Brothers film studio in the early 1930s. These stories were used as the basis for a… Read More

380 pages. Small octavo (8 1/4" x 5 1/2") issued in orange cloth with purple lettering to front cover and offset coloring to spine in original pictorial jacket. First American edition.One of the outstanding literary figures of this generation, Ford Madox Ford is equally distinguished as a poet, essayist, biographer, critic and novelist. Here he has turned his great abilities to the job he likes best of all - the telling of a story, with its psychology, its flavor, its drama, deeply rooted in the present-day; its background in France and America. He takes a study in the exchange of identities, and shows us that, even though Henry Martin Alluin Smith did not commit suicide, as he had planned; even though he took over the identity of a man who did, nevertheless if one changes his identity without changing his nature hi is no better off than he was before. Written with the distinction for which Ford Madox Ford is famous, The Rash Act is a psychological novel of the first importance, permeated with the… Read More

[4]+392+[2] pages with a frontispiece from a painting by William Van Dresser. Small Octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's blue cloth illustrated in black,cream and orange, lettered in cream and gilt. (BAL 11966) (Sisson & Martens pg 87) First edition.A tale about a love triangle on a large ranch. Though not published until the year of London's death, he had written this during his bad year of 1913. He spent much of that year visiting a dentist, finally having all of his upper teeth pulled to halt the pyorrhea raging in his gums; at about the same time, his Wolf House burned down two weeks before its completion; and his kidney problems continued to worsen, exacerbated by his drinking and his insistence upon eating raw fish and duck. [The novel] was meant to exalt the splendor of Wolf House and scientific farming and sex." "It is all sex from start to finish", he wrote to the editor of Cosmopolitan, "in which no sexual adventure is actually achieved or comes within a million miles of… Read More

322 pages. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/4") bound in original publisher's yellow cloth with green lettering and illustration to spine in original pictorial jacket. (Firsts volume 13, number 1, page 46) First American edition.Summer Moonshine is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on October 8, 1937 by Doubleday, Doran, New York, and in the United Kingdom on February 11, 1938 by Herbert Jenkins, London. It was previously serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (US) from 24 July to 11 September 1937 and in Pearson's Magazine (UK) between September 1937 and April 1938. Former big-game hunter Sir Buckstone Abbott, finding himself hard up, takes in paying guests at his pile, Walsingford Hall, while hoping to sell the place to a wealthy Princess. Pretty soon, all kinds of schemes, plots and romantic entanglements are going on. Condition:Light sunning to top edges. Jacket spine sunned, spine ends chipped, some wear with small chips and closed tears to edges else a very good copy in… Read More