Search Results: Authors starting with M from Sumner & Stillman

1868. [signed by George MacDonald] London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868. Original maroon cloth decorated in gilt (portraying medieval-style external book hinges). First Edition. This is the second novel in MacDonald's "Marshmallows Trilogy" -- the other two being ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBOURHOOD (Hurst & Blackett 1867) and THE VICAR'S DAUGHTER (Tinsley 1872, same style binding as this). It takes place in the English seaside village of Bude (the father of the family, a vicar, is serving as interim pastor there), and is the result of a MacDonald family vacation there. This is a near-fine set (spines slightly faded as always with maroon, just a hint of wear at the tips, minor bubbling of the cloth on Vol I). Wolff (4304) had only a set in the secondary binding, without hinge decoration or publisher's name); Sadleir did not have a copy at all. Housed in an open-back case. The half-title of Vol I is signed by George MacDonald (actually, MacDonald inscribed it to someone, but the inscription itself is rubbed… Read More

1894. Derby: printd by Harpur and Murray at the Moray Press in May 1894 and sold by Frank Murray at his Bookshops in Derby Leicester and Nottingham. Original flexible boards covered with glazed grey-green paper elaborately decorated in gilt. First Edition (trade issue -- there were also 75 numbered/signed copies), published as a volume in the printer's "Regent Library." This "romance of the Isles" is in fact the first book to bear the name "Fiona Macleod" -- by this Scottish writer of the 'Nineties whose true identity was so long in being discovered. From the very beginning a vein of mystic pantheism, born of these [Scottish Highland] mountains and his Gaelic blood, showed itself in the boy's nature. Three times he ran away from home to live in the mountain solitude, once spending an entire unforgettable summer in a gypsy encampment. [K&H] Sharp went on to write both under his own name and under the secret pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod"; until his death at the end of 1905, only his wife and a few… Read More

1926. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Original green-blue cloth with spine label, with dust jacket. First American Edition of the author's first book, published fifteen years after the 500-copy English edition (and three years after her death). In 1909, Kathleen Beauchamp's mother traveled to London from their native New Zealand to check on her daughter -- and discovered 20-year-old Kathleen pregnant by one man, married to but quickly separated from (the same day!) another man, and living with a woman. Her mother sent Kathleen off to spend 1909-1910 in a German pension -- which specialized in "hosing down" its guests with ice water! Kathleen quickly moved to a cheaper (and presumably less-invigorating) pension; during these months she suffered a miscarriage. As pointed out by John Middleton Murry (her subsequent second husband), in the Introduction that he wrote for this (and the second English) edition, "Katherine" would not allow this book to be reprinted. In 1920 she had written to Murry, "I… Read More

1923. London: Constable & Co., (1923). Original brown paper boards with buff cloth spine and red leather spine label, with dust jacket. First Edition of Katherine Mansfield's verse, collected by her husband John Middleton Murry and published just ten months after her death by tuberculosis at age 34. The verse is divided into "Poems: 1909-1910," "Poems: 1911-1913," "Poems at the Villa Pauline: 1916," "Poems: 1917-1919" and "Child Verses: 1907." Included is Murry's "Introductory Note," explaining how she wrote her poetry. Kirkpatrick gives the height of this volume as 9-3/16", but this copy is definitely an exact 9-1/2" tall. It is in fine condition. The dust jacket is very good-plus, with very minor edge-wear and some foxing. Kirkpatrick A7a.

1924. London: Constable & Co., (1924). Original grey cloth stamped in violet, with dust jacket. First Edition, second and usual issue (a very few copies, once pegged at 34 in number, were first issued without the "First Published, 1924" on the title page verso). Knopf's American edition, published the same year, was titled THE LITTLE GIRL. This posthumous collection of 25 stories includes writings from as early as 1908 (when the New Zealand native was only 19). The title story, actually "Something Childish but very Natural," is a tale of young love beginning with a chance encounter of two teenagers on a commuter train, replete with the proper awkwardness and ultimately the intrusion of fate. (She wrote it in 1914, when she and John Middleton Murry were living penniless in France; after she died in 1923 at age 34, it was he who had his wife's book published (in his Introductory Note he says "I have no doubt that Katherine Mansfield, were she still alive, would not have suffered some of these stories… Read More

1906. London: Chapman and Hall, 1906. Original rose linen-grain cloth. First Edition, believed to have consisted of no more than 1500 copies. In 1900 Punch Magazine had asked Maugham to contribute a couple of stories, one of which was "Cupid and the Vicar of Swale." Over the next few years he converted this story in two ways: into the play LOAVES AND FISHES (written in 1902 but not performed until 1911 and not published until 1924), and into this full-length novel THE BISHOP'S APRON -- which describes Canon Spratte's campaign to wed a beer heiress and obtain a bishopric. The tone was farcical, the dialogue epigrammatic. This insipid period piece... found favor with reviewers. The Bookman in its April [1906] issue said "the whole book is an admirable blend of cynical gaiety and broadly farcical comedy; it is the smartest and most genuinely humourous novel that the season has yet given us." The Punch reviewer... said on February 21 that it was "the best clerical novel since BARCHESTER TOWERS."… Read More

1930. London: William Heinemann, (1930). Original blue cloth, with dust jacket. First Edition of perhaps his best novel, a witty and delicious comedy of literary England in the early decades of the 20th century, told in the first person by a novelist, Ashenden. The pushing and self-advertising novelist Alroy Kear wants to get at the details of the early life of Edward Driffield, an eminent novelist whose biography Kear has been commissioned to write. Ashenden had known Driffield and his first wife Rosie, a barmaid; Rosie, the skeleton in the cupboard of Driffield's life, is Kear's stumbling block -- he is not honest enough to be given the facts that Ashenden gives the reader. Rosie is a wonderful character -- affectionate, amoral, and generous. The narrator is obviously Maugham but he denied what so many readers were quick to conclude: that Alroy Kear was founded on Hugh Walpole and Edward Driffield on Thomas Hardy. [CGEL] This copy lacks the "t" of "won't" on line 14 of p. 147, which is often… Read More

1948. Nicoll, Gordon. A Romance. London: William Heinemann, (1948). Original red cloth lettered in silver, with dust jacket. First Edition of Maugham's last novel, published two months before the American one. Set in Spain during the Inquisition, it told of a crippled girl to whom the Blessed Virgin appears in a vision. She will be healed by one of three brothers, the one who has best served God. One brother is a bishop, another is a soldier, and the third is a baker. It comes as no surprise that the humble panadero succeeds in healing the girl... In the slackness of the writing, the descent into cliche, and the contrived plot devices, CATALINA betrayed Maugham's declining powers... [It] was a feeble book with which to end a fifty-year career as a novelist. [Morgan] This copy has its lettering in silver (the publisher started out using silver but finding it unsatisfactory switched to imitation gold -- "both variations were delivered to the bookshops simultaneously"). It is a fine, bright copy; the… Read More

1915. [with letter from Theodore Dreise] New York: George H. Doran Company, n.d. [1915]. Original green cloth. First Edition, published one day earlier than Heinemann's edition in London. This was Maugham's famed autobiographical novel about Philip Carey, who has a club foot and who attends King's School, Tercanbury [Maugham had a stammer and attended King's School, Canterbury]; who rejects the idea of the ministry and who studies in Heidelberg and later becomes a doctor [like Maugham]; who becomes obsessed with a vulgar waitress, Mildred Rogers, who goes to a bad end [cf. Liza of Lambeth], etc. But the novel succeeds because of its unflinching honesty and its devastating account of loneliness, the most tragic of all human conditions. [CGEL] This copy is in the later state, with the error on the fourth line of p. 257 corrected (also on lighter weight paper). The binding is correspondingly later state, with the stamping in black rather than in gilt (due to the onset of the war). Condition is fine… Read More

1937. To "Dear Mr. Seale," one page on "5 Portland Place, W.1." stationery. No legible date, but 1937-1938. This is Maugham's response to a Mr. Seale who had apparently asked about a good introductory book on philosophy. The text of this letter is: Cyril Joad brought out with Gollancz last year or the year before a book called, I think, a Handbook to Philosophy, which is very clear and readable, with a very good bibliography at the end of each chapter; this I think will give you exactly what you want. I am not quite sure if that is the exact title, but any good bookseller will be able to have the book for you. I know Gollancz is the publisher. Yours sincerely [signed] W.S. Maugham We do not know who "Mr Seale" was (the greeting and the closing imply that Maugham did not know him), but Cyril E.M. Joad (1891-1953) was quite a character -- an English philosopher who did indeed write A GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY (Maugham was close), published by Victor Gollancz in 1936; the book is still in print, and is still… Read More

1894. London: Chapman and Hall, 1894. Original olive green cloth decorated in black. First Edition of Meredith's last three-decker novel, which consisted of 1,500 copies -- published, in fact, in the final year of the three-volume format, as the lending libraries had finally lost their decades-long control over the publishing of English fiction. The next year would see Meredith's last multi-volume novel, THE AMAZING MARRIAGE in two volumes, which would carry through with the same topic as LORD ORMONT -- that a woman should be free to leave a marriage in which her husband does not consider her to be an equal partner. This set is in fine condition -- one bumped fore-corner, some foxing on the (intact) original endpapers caused by the binder's glue, but essentially no other wear nor soil. The spine gilt is not at all worn, but we have never seen a copy of this title with what we could call gleaming gilt. Collie XIV; Sadleir 1699; Wolff 4740.

1891. London: Chapman and Hall, 1891. Original royal blue cloth decorated in black. First Edition of what is "generally considered the most stylistically opaque and tortured of his [Meredith's] novels" [Williams]. Victor Radnor, Nataly Dreighton and their daughter Nesta have been supremely happy for twenty years; but now that Nesta is of marriageable age, it is time she and her suitor know that Victor is in fact married to a much older woman -- whom he had married for money, but who ever since has not had the decency either to divorce him or to die. As usual with Meredith's novels, the comedy of this situation turns to tragedy. In this set the front free endpaper versos bear Meredith ads (in some copies they are blank -- priority uncertain). It is a bright, close-to-fine set (a touch of bubbling of the cloth near the top of one front cover, very minor rubbing at the corners). This is not a scarce book, but truly fine copies are difficult to find. Collie XIII; Sadleir 1700c; Carter p. 141.

1859. [in an unrecorded binding] London: Chapman and Hall, 1859. Original blind-stamped rose-brown cloth. First Edition of George Meredith's first full-length novel (preceded only by a volume of verse and two single-volume burlesques). FEVEREL is the tough tale of a father's "system" of raising his son, developed not so much out of concern for his son as out of revenge for the wife who had left him. Meredith wrote FEVEREL during the stressful years of the disintegration of his own marriage to Mary Ellen Peacock (daughter of Thomas Love Peacock). In 1858, in fact, she had left him for another man, whose child she bore while still Meredith's legal wife (she died of renal dropsy in 1861). FEVEREL was a complete failure upon publication. Periodical reviewers made such comments as "This 'Ordeal' is about as painful a book as any reader ever felt himself compelled to read through...", and suggested that proper matrons would be well-advised to avoid it. Complaints about the novel's "low ethical tone"… Read More

1894. London: Chapman and Hall, 1894. Original olive green cloth decorated in black. First Edition of Meredith's last three-decker novel, which consisted of 1,500 copies -- published, in fact, in the final year of the three-volume format, as the lending libraries had finally lost their decades-long control over the publishing of English fiction. The next year would see Meredith's last multi-volume novel, THE AMAZING MARRIAGE in two volumes, which would carry through with the same topic as LORD ORMONT -- that a woman should be free to leave a marriage in which her husband does not consider her to be an equal partner. This set is in close-to-fine condition -- very light rubbing on some edges, but essentially no other wear nor soil. The spine gilt is intact but we have never seen a copy of this title with what we could call gleaming gilt. Collie XIV; Sadleir 1699; Wolff 4740. Provenance: each front free endpaper bears the penciled signature "Simon Nowell-Smith | July 1936" -- the bibliophile and author… Read More

1893. Cambridge & Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1893. Original grey cloth decorated in gilt, beveled. First Edition, which consisted of only 500 copies (so stated). This tale, by the Hoosier who migrated to the Pacific Northwest, takes place in Jerusalem and the Holy Lands at the time of Christ. It is today collected largely as a fine production by the publisher Stone & Kimball. A fine copy. Kramer 6.

1928. With Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard. London: Methuen & Co., (1928). Original pink cloth pictorially decorated in gilt, with dust jacket. First Edition of this the fourth and last Milne/Shepard collaboration (and the second of them in prose, after WINNIE THE POOH). This is also the book in which Tigger first makes an appearance. Tales include "A House is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore," "Tigger Comes to the Forest and has Breakfast" (Tigger's first appearance in a book), "Piglet does a Very Grand Thing" and "Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There." This is a remarkably fine, bright volume; the dust jacket is just about fine as well (a couple of faint edge-bumps but essentially no soil or wear); there is the remnant of a bookseller sticker at the bottom of the front flap). NCBEL IV 671. Housed in a morocco-backed slipcase with inner chemise.

1931. London: Methuen & Co., (1931). Original oatmeal cloth with green panels, with dust jacket. First Edition (of Milne's first attempt at seriously tackling the novel form, according to the jacket). It is a study, almost stream-of-consciousness style, of a marriage between two people who have virtually nothing in common, other than their love for each other. This is a fine copy, in a nearly fine jacket (very slight wear at the spine head -- as usual, since the jacket is a tad taller than the book).

1866. being A Narrative of Certain Events in the Life of an Orthodox Minister of Connecticut. By the Author of "My Farm of Edgewood." In Two Volumes. New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1866. Original green cloth. First Edition of this "delicate and leisurely story of New England village life in the early 19th century, concerned with the contrast between the rigid Calvinism of Connecticut and the external influence of Catholicism through two French women characters" [OCAL]. This copy is in Blanck's "binding B" (no priority), with a fillet-and-leaf design rather than a triple gilt rule at top and bottom of spine. Curiously the author's name appears on the spines, but not on the title pages. This is a remarkably fine set (corner of one endpaper chipped away). Blanck 13943.

1897. An Old Governess's Tale. By the Author of 'John Halifax, Gentleman.' With Prefatory Letter by the Author. London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1897. 2+32 pp undated ads. Original dark blue cloth decorated in gilt. First Edition of this collection of six contributions that had appeared in Chambers's Journal in the late 1840s, here published in book form for the first time -- as a tribute, ten years after the author's death. This is an unusually bright copy, fine except for a small mark on the front cover. Sadleir 1810; Wolff 4991.

1877. An Old-Fashioned Love Story. By the Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1877. 7 pp undated ads. Original blue cloth decorated in black. First Edition (following serialization in Good Words in the latter half of 1876). This tale involves a governess who must wait seventeen years for the man she loves to return to her. This is a near-fine copy, slightly rubbed at the binding extremities. Not in Sadleir; Wolff 4998.