Pinnacle. Volume XXV
by [Anderson, Laurie]
Glen Ellyn, Illinois: Glenbard West High School, 1964. 1964 high school yearbook of American performance artist Laurie Anderson, chronicling her junior year at Glenbard West High School in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. In addition to her class photograph, Anderson appears three times: as a member of the Helladians, “the honor society for students with outstanding artistic... Read More
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Home of the Brave: A Film by Laurie Anderson; with: two promotional photographs
by Anderson, Laurie; Fincher, Les (photographer)
No place: Talk Normal Productions, 1986. First edition of this promotional booklet documenting Laurie Anderson’s 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, which itself was an effort to document her marathon stage performance of United States I-IV. The booklet features film stills, lyrics, and notes on the piece’s staging, instrumentation, and sound design, including images of creative collaborators Janice... Read More
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Orlando Furioso Di Ariosto. With Memoirs and Notes by Antonio Panizzi
by Ariosto, Lodovico; Panizzi, Antonio (editor); [Currer, Frances Mary Richardson]
London: William Pickering, 1834. First Panizzi edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, issued in four volumes by William Pickering in 1834, from the celebrated library of Frances Mary Richardson Currer. Set during the Saracen invasion of France, Orlando Furioso (1516-1532) follows the adventures of Charlemagne’s high-strung knight Orlando, who goes mad for love. Ariosto’s comic epic was hugely influential, going... Read More
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“Swift, Swift the Great Twin Brethren Came Spurring from the East”
by Ault, Norman
England, 1911. Original watercolor by Norman Ault for his 1911 illustrated edition of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome, first published in 1842. A scholar of poetry as well as an illustrator, Ault brought a deep understanding to Macaulay’s verse history, retellings of heroic episodes of classical history recited by generations of British schoolchildren. In this dramatic... Read More
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Peter and Wendy
by Barrie, James Matthew; Bedford, Francis (illustrator)
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911. First American edition of J.M. Barrie’s tale of Peter Pan’s boyhood adventures, the foundation of most future adaptations, issued simultaneously with the first English edition. Barrie’s first account of Peter Pan, published in The Little White Bird (1902), featured Peter as a baby, inspiring Barrie’s collaboration with Arthur Rackham in Peter Pan in... Read More
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The Savoy (advertisement)
by Beardsley, Aubrey
London: C.F. Kell for Leonard Smithers, 1896. Original advertising “posterette” featuring Aubrey Beardsley’s final cover design for The Savoy. A lavish quarterly devoted to literature, art, and criticism (mostly of Victorian behaviors), The Savoy was founded in 1896 by the libertine book dealer and publisher Leonard Smithers. Known for his decadent illustrations for Salomé and The Yellow Book, Beardsley... Read More
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American Critical Essays: Twentieth Century
by Beaver, Harold (editor); Auden, W.H.; Cowley, Malcolm; Matthiessen, F.O.; Mencken, H.L.; Pound, Ezra; Trilling, Lionel; Warren, Robert Penn; Wilson, Edmund; et al.
London: Oxford University Press, 1959. First edition, publisher’s presentation copy, of this midcentury collection of American men (and only men) of letters, signed by contributor Robert Penn Warren. Editor Harold Beaver construes “American” broadly, “not interpreting the word by place of birth or parentage only, but also by passport and length of residence,” a decision that allows him to... Read More
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Tales
by Beiles, Sinclair; Skotnes, Cecil (illustrator)
(Johannesburg): Gryphon Poets, 1972. First edition of the first book by South African Beat poet Sinclair Beiles to be published in his home country, featuring vibrant original woodcuts by Cecil Skotnes. Beiles played a key role in a number of important Beat publications. In the 1950s, he befriended Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in Tangier, taking walks with... Read More
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Madeline
by Bemelmans, Ludwig
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. First edition of the first of Ludwig Bemelmans’s exuberant Madeline books, featuring the adventures of a daring schoolgirl and her classmates at Miss Clavel’s school “in a place pronounced Paree.” Bemelmans’s detailed illustrations introduced generations of American children to the landmarks of Paris: in Madeline, he depicts the Place de la Concorde, the... Read More
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A Version of Solomon’s Song of Songs; Together with the XLV. Psalm
by [BIBLE]; Stennett, Joseph (translator)
London: Printed for Dan. Brown at the Black Swan and Bible without Temple-bar, and Andr. Bell at the Cross-keys and Bible in Cornhil, 1700. First edition of this verse translation of the Song of Songs by Joseph Stennett (1663-1713), the first important Baptist hymnwriter in England: “Thy Lips, my Spouse, that move with skill, / Drops like the Hony-comb... Read More
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Practical Hints on Light and Shade in Painting. Illustrated by Examples from the Italian, Flemish, and Dutch Schools
by Burnet, John
London: Printed for the Proprietor, and Sold by James Carpenter and Son, Old Bond Street, 1826. First edition of this introduction to chiaroscuro by Scottish painter John Burnet, whose popular treatises on art theory and practice would be reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly a century. This work follows the success of Burnet’s 1822 Practical Hints... Read More
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Journey from Essex. Poems for John Clare
by Clare, John; McPherson, Sandra (editor); Anderson, Jon; Ashbery, John; Bell, Marvin; Halperin, Mark; Logan, William; Roethke, Theodore
Port Townsend, Washington: Graywolf Press, 1981. First edition, one of “approximately 300 copies,” of this tribute to “peasant poet” John Clare (1793-1864). A Northamptonshire farm laborer whose personal struggles were compounded by mental illness, Clare produced hundreds of closely observed lyrics that remain startling in their immediacy and detail: “And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, / Untroubling... Read More
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Homes of the Freed
by Cooley, Rossa B; Dillard, J.H. (introduction); Lankes, J.J. (woodcuts)
New York: New Republic, 1926. First edition of Rossa Cooley’s account of domestic life among the Gullah islanders of St. Helena in the Carolina Lowcountry. Vassar-educated reformer Cooley was the longtime principal of St. Helena’s Penn School, founded in 1862 as one of the first schools for Black students in the South. Cooley arrived on the island in 1904,... Read More
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Calligraphic exercise featuring neoclassical French poets
by Corneille, Pierre; Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux); Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
Laval, France, late nineteenth century. Calligraphic leaf from a manuscript produced by a Carmelite sister or novitiate in the Immaculate Conception Carmel at Laval, France, established in 1856. Three literary quotations, transcribed here in a neat minuscule hand, represent major French poets of the seventeenth century. The first passage is drawn from Corneille’s neoclassical tragedy Polyeucte (1643), the story... Read More
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A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands
by Delano, Amasa; [Fanning, Edmund]
Boston: E.G. House, for the Author, 1817. First edition of Massachusetts sea captain Amasa Delano’s account of his voyages between 1790 and 1810, covering the Hawaiian, “Pelew,” and Galapagos islands; Manila, Canton and Macao; New Guinea, Australia, and the East Indies; and Chile and Peru. Delano’s narrative is best remembered for his account of the capture of the Spanish... Read More
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Picture Posters to Color: Fruits and Vegetables
by [DESIGN]; Elms, F. Raymond
Chicago: Beckley-Cardy Company, 1951. Complete set of midcentury classroom posters, designed to be colored by students. The twelve fruits and vegetables featured here are apples, beets, carrots, cherries, grapes, peaches, pears, radishes, strawberries, sweet corn, tomatoes, and wax beans, each depicted on the tree, vine or stalk. As a footnote, each image offers specific instructions on which colors the... Read More
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Kunstgewerbliche Schmuckformen für die Fläche. Vierteljahrshefte für die verzierende Kunst, Volume XV, Plate 1
by [DESIGN]; Nitsche, J.
Plauen: Christian Stoll, 1915. Vibrant Art Deco ornamental design, Plate 1 from Volume XV of Kunstgewerbliche Schmuckformen für die Fläche. Christian Stoll’s influential pattern book series was an important source for graphic design in central Europe from the height of the Art Nouveau movement to the early days of Art Deco. Modernist surface designs like this one reflected the... Read More
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Sheet of six Épinal prints, military and religious subjects
by [DESIGN]
France: no publisher, no date (early twentieth century). Striking hand-colored sheet of six “images d'Épinal.” Inexpensive broadsides like these were hugely popular in France in the nineteenth century: naïve woodcuts, brightly colored, featuring images of Catholic saints, Napoleonic battles, and storybook characters. By the turn of the twentieth century, lithography had emerged as the primary printing process, and the... Read More
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Sheet of six Épinal prints, domestic and religious subjects
by [DESIGN]
France: no publisher, no date (early twentieth century). Striking hand-colored sheet of six “images d'Épinal.” Inexpensive broadsides like these were hugely popular in France in the nineteenth century: naïve woodcuts, brightly colored, featuring images of Catholic saints, Napoleonic battles, and storybook characters. By the turn of the twentieth century, lithography had emerged as the primary printing process, and the... Read More
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Hand-painted embroidery design depicting a parrot, a snail, and a lizard
by [DESIGN]
France, nineteenth century. Large fragment of an original embroidery design, likely for a shawl or tablecloth, executed in red watercolor. The stylized parrot, snail, and lizard are meticulously plotted out by hand, stitch by stitch, against a background of oak leaves and acorns. This design is plotted on “papier quadrillé” manufactured by the Paris publisher Chavant & Dessaigne. Fleury... Read More
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A Christmas Carol
by Dickens, Charles; Rackham, Arthur (illustrator)
London and Philadelphia: William Heinemann and J.B. Lippincott, 1915. Signed limited edition of Arthur Rackham’s illustrated version of Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic, number 272 of 525 copies signed by the artist. Written in a mere six weeks at a low point in Dickens’s career, and published at his own expense, A Christmas Carol revived his fortunes, establishing a robust market... Read More
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Northern Lullaby; with: signed publisher’s poster
by Dillon, Leo and Diane (illustrators); Carlstrom, Nancy White
New York: Philomel Books, 1992. First edition, review copy, of Nancy White Carlstrom’s Alaskan bedtime story, richly illustrated with Native American imagery by Leo and Diane Dillon, accompanied by the publisher’s signed promotional poster. A sleepy young narrator bids goodnight to the Earth, each feature of the snow-covered landscape imagined as part of the family: “Goodnight Papa Star /... Read More
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Jazz on a Saturday Night; with: signed publisher’s poster
by Dillon, Leo and Diane
New York: The Blue Sky Press / Scholastic, 2007. First edition of Leo and Diane Dillon’s tribute to American jazz musicians, accompanied by a signed promotional poster. As a work-weary crowd gathers in a concert hall to hear live music on a Saturday night, jazz greats including Miles Davis, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk fill the stage, creating a... Read More
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To Every Thing There Is a Season. Verses from Ecclesiastes
by Dillon, Leo and Diane
New York: The Blue Sky Press / Scholastic, 1998. First trade edition of Leo and Diane Dillon’s illustrated tribute to the Book of Ecclesiastes, inscribed by both illustrators. Among the most quoted of all Bible verses, these Old Testament lines resonate across cultures, reminding readers of the experiences that all people share: “To every thing there is a season,... Read More
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Giganten. Ein Abenteuerbuch
by Döblin, Alfred; [Steinberg, Isaac]; [Steinberg, Leo]
Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1932. First edition of German novelist Alfred Döblin’s Giganten, inscribed by Döblin to the Russian-Jewish political writer Isaac Steinberg (1888-1957), from the library of Steinberg’s son, art historian Leo Steinberg (1920-2011). While Döblin is best remembered for his 1929 realist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, critical attention in recent years has turned to his ambitious, dystopian works... Read More
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