Over 150 first editions, association copies, letters, and more, from an important collection. Including books by both Leonard and Virginia Woolf, their family, and friends. Featuring a lovely copy of their handprinted edition of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the black tulip of the handprinted books of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press: the memorial volume Poems by Leonard’s brother Sidney, recently killed in the war. 

Please click here for a digital catalog.

For further information, email Sarah@GlennHorowitz.com

A cycle of lyric poems evoking love and loss: set in Shimla, in the Himalayala mountains, and in the old Viceregal Lodge --  now called Rashtrapati Nivas.

15pp.; ca. 6.25 x 9.25 inches.
 

Limited to 150 copies, signed by Alexander: 

125 in red handmade wrappers, string-tied. $40

25 in patterned cloth. $125

On December 5, 2011, on the Paris Review Daily, we wrote about the survey on symbolism high school student and budding science fiction writer Bruce McAllister sent to 150 writers in 1963. PRD posted a number of replies from Kerouac, Mailer, Rand, Bellow, Updike, Ellison, and Bradbury.

The San Diego Union Tribune picked up the story a few days later and contacted not only McAllister himself, as had we, but also current teachers and students at his high school.

During the past week we have enjoyed following many of the discussions these surveys have engendered. Many readers have remarked on Ayn Rand’s less than generous response (the Atlantic Wire headlined, “Ayn Rand Was Meaner Than You Think").  As an antidote to that, we are happy to post today Joseph Heller’s thoughtful survey and cover letter.

Others have expressed an interest in the handwriting of individual authors, to which we respond with the survey of Richard Hughes. Hughes breaks each question down into its parts, signs and dates his survey, and offers a postscript turning the question of symbolism in literature, tidily, back onto McAllister: “Have you considered the extent to which subconscious symbol-making is part of the process of reading, quite distinct from its part in writing?”

An important collection documenting the life and work of Virginia Woolf, the woman who helped to bring literature -- and women -- from the Victorian age into the modern era. Beekman's collection spans Woolf's entire life, shining a light into her youth and adolescence, her familial and romantic relationships over time, her printing and publishing work at The Hogarth Press and, of course, her own writing.

Featuring original color photographs by David Levinthal.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time, at The Forbes Gallery in New York City, from November 21, 2011 – January 14, 2012.

134 pp.; 9 x 6 in., pictorial wrappers, $65

Deluxe limited edition, one of 25 copies, slipcased with a limited print numbered and signed by Levinthal. $2500

A presentation copy of the 1946 Modern Library edition of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, inscribed to Phil Stone, Faulkner’s early literary mentor, later friend, and dedicatee of all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy.

Faulkner’s relationship with Phil Stone, an Oxford native and Yale graduate four years his senior, was  seminal. When in 1915, at the age of 18, Faulkner determined not to return to high school for his junior year, Phil Stone took on the role of tutor. Faulkner’s brother John later recalled,

The Stones had a big old Studebaker touring car, a sever-passenger affair. Phil loaded it with books for Bill to read and turned the car over to him. Bill would go out on some country road, a side road where it was quiet, and park the car and spend the day reading. He taught himself French out there and later he actually taught French at the University. Phil’s guidance was good, for it put the finishing touches on the reading program that Mother had established in all of us…. What Phil picked for Bill to read was pretty much what she would have chosen. Bill read Plato, Socrates, the Greek poets, all the good Romans and Shakespeare. He also read the other good English writers and the French and German classics. (My Brother Bill, 130)

Ken Kesey's December 1986 response to a questionnaire posed by writer James L. Harmon, who wrote to influential writers, actors, musicians, and other well-known individuals, requesting they answer the prompt, “If you could offer the young people of today one piece of advice, what would it be?”

Harmon accumulated ‘advice,’ he notes in his introduction, for over a decade. His collection was eventually published in 2002’s Take Their Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two, in which Kesey's piece appears.

Original art for nine different posters, with promotional text painted directly onto thick posterboard or mounted from drawing paper drafts. At least five of the posters are from the play’s 1942 Broadway debut, though their text and imagery differ considerably; two are signed by the artist, Polish illustrator Witold Gordon, known for his New Yorker cover art. Printed versions of three iterations are also present.  

Following William Faulkner's death on July 6, 1962, a memorial broadside distributed by a local newspaper to businesses in Oxford, Mississippi.

Twenty-one lines in Faulkner’s hand, an early alternate text of a key passage in Light in August. This leaf went from Faulkner to Dorothy Parker, who in turn passed it on to Archibald Macleish, who annotated it helpfully in pencil: Faulkner ms given me by Dorothy Parker in 1930 (?) A Macleish.

When Parker met Faulkner through George Oppenheimer, the co-founder of the Viking Press, she was taken with him immediately: “He seemed so vulnerable, so helpless,” she later wrote. “You just wanted to protect him.” 

This manuscript fragment presents an alternate version of a pivotal passage in the novel, providing a fascinating glimpse into Faulkner’s naming of Joe Christmas and his use of Christian imagery throughout the novel. J.C. shares his initials with Jesus Christ; Christmas appeared in front of an orphanage on Christmas Day; the novel has 66 characters – the Bible, 66 books. From the manuscript:

Old Doc Hines the murderer that’s what he’s been and will ever be, because a man lives free in the evil he seen and what he done. ‘Out of come evil a evil come,’ God said to old Doc Hines. . . The Lord’s run both come did 16 give old Doc Hines the chance to wait and watch while evil ground out evil. Finest evil. . .” In this passage, much is made of the orphanage, and the delivery of the young boy to it: “So they named him Christmas Knight because the Madame was away spending Xmas and the doc with lustful Jezebel and them other young sluts was drinking eggnog where the doc had sent them... But the Madame came bored from where she was spending Xmas and so changed his name because Christmas Knight was sacrilege, so they called him Chris and God said to old Doc Hines ‘But that aint it. Because a little child shall lead him.’ So old Doc Hines he watched and he waited. . . and he saw the devil’s own seed began to pollute the evil. . . until one day old Doc Hines heard the other children call him Joe and old Doc Hines asked them why they called him Joe. ‘Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy,’ the orphans said. And old Doc Hines asked them why they called him Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy, It aint his face, old Doc Hines said. It aint his face because his face aint any darker than some of yours. It aint his brain because his brain aint any ... than some of yours. It aint his eyes because his eyes aint any ... than some of yours. ‘But that aint it yet,’ Gold told old Dic Hines. ‘You watch and wait. Because a little child shall lead them.’ So old Doc Hines he watched and he waited. And one day he heard them. From God’s own book come loudly out, he seen and heard ‘Nigger! Nigger!’ The voices of little orphan children that Knew not sin because it was God’s private one: ‘Nigger! Nigger!’ And old Doc Hines asken them why they called him nigger. But they [ends].

This text reveals a psychological maelstrom with more explicit Christian references, and a more direct involvement of God, than Faulkner settled for in the published version. In the first edition this sequence is changed and expanded, but the naming of Christmas is toned down (and the Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy correlation is removed). 

For more information, please contact sarah@glennhorowitz.com

An archive of enthusiastic critical correspondence and promotional printed matter relating to the 1946 New York premiere – a preview screening – of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Henry V.

Present are approximately fifty pages of promotional materials prepared by The Theatre Guild, who underwrote the picture; with nearly twenty individual signed letters from prominent figures in cultural circles, including Carl Van Doren, Lillian Hellman, Franklin P. Adams, Guthrie McClintic, Margalo Gillmore, Carl Van Vechten, and others.