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Lewis (Wyndham, editor)
Blast, No.1 & 2 (all published), 1914-15.

Contributors to this important manifesto of Vorticism include Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Hueffer, Rebecca West, T.S.Eliot, and the artists Gaudier-Brzeska, C.R.W.Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth and Jacob Epstein.

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Illustrations of Rip Van Winkle [&] Illustrations of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving. Illustrations by F.O.C. Darley.
The American Art-Union, New York, 1848 & 1849

2 volumes. Each with 6 full-page illustrations by F.O.C. Darley. (Oblong folio) 32x39 cm. (12½x15¼”), original wrappers.

Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1822–1888) was an American painter and illustrator, known for his illustrations in works by authors including: James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Mary Maples Dodge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, George Lippard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Donald Grant Mitchell, Clement Clarke Moore, Frances Parkman, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Parker Willis.

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Author: Van Nostrand, Jeanne
Edward Vischer’s Drawings of the California Missions,
1861-1878. With a Biography of the Artist by Jeanne Van Nostrand
San Francisco, Book Club of California, 1982.
Printed by Arion Press.

Introduction by Thomas Albright. With 44 color plates (including frontispiece) from Vischer’s drawings. (Oblong 4to) golden-brown linen lettered in gilt. One of 600 copies printed by the Arion Press under the direction of Andrew Hoyem.
Vischer is credited with capturing in his drawings the look and feel of the colonial past with far more freedom and vividness than his several competitors. Some of his drawings “reconstruct” derelict mission buildings. BCC 172.

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1864-1901. Dessins, Estampes, Affiches
Maurice Joyant. H. Floury, Paris, 1927.

Illustrated throughout with color plates, plates printed green, red or black, black and white illustrations and one original dry-point etching “Portrait de Monsieur X”. 26.2x19.8 cm. (10¼x7¾”), modern half morocco & marbled boards, spine tooled in gilt, morocco labels; original front wrapper bound in.

Beautifully illustrated catalogue of the works of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, including many color reproductions of original lithographs on fine paper; and the original dry-point.

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The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner
Daniel Defoe. San Francisco, Limited Editions Club, 1930. (Story first published 1719)

Introduction by Ford Madox Ford. Color illustrations by Edward A. Wilson. (Large 8vo) 26.5x18 cm. (10½x7”), blue morocco backed cloth. From an edition of 1500 copies printed by the Grabhorn Press.

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Ink & Blood. A Book of Drawings
Arthur Szyk. New York, Heritage Press,1946.

14], 18, [3] pp. + 4 color plates and 70 monochrome plates. Also with a color frontispiece depicting Szyk at work. With a prefatory text by Struthers Burt. 12¼x9, original morocco, top edge gilt, spine gilt-lettered; original batik-printed board slipcase. One of 1000 inscribed and signed copies.

This copy inscribed for Byron Nishkian. Important post-Holocaust drawings by Szyk. As Burt wrote in the introduction: “This book…these cartoons, the words that accompany them…have a much deeper purpose than to deride and reveal our recent enemies”…”this is NOT A WAR-BOOK, although most of the cartoons were drawn in the time of war. This is a PEACE-BOOK; a book for the parlous years that follow upon war…”

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15 Stories by William Hope Hodgson
Madison: Strange Company, 1988 

Each Individually Bound 15 white stiff paper bound deckle edged pamphets. Front covers have a facsimile signature of the author printed in blue on the front. Each pamphlet housed in an envelope printed with the title & a small illustration of a ship. Signed by R. Alain Everts on the title page of each pamphlet. The 15 pamphlets are “Fifty Dead Chinamen All in a Row”, “From the Tideless Sea”, “Homeward Bound”, “Old Golly”, “Sea Horses”, “The Baumoff Explosive”, “The Goddess of Death”, “The Heaving of the Log”, “The Mystery of the Ship in the Night”, “The Phantom Ship”, “The Riven Night”, “The Room of Fear”, “The Valley of Lost Children”, “The Ways of the Heathens” (misprinted on the envelope as ‘The Way of the Heathens’) & “The Terrible Derelict”. Most stories originally published in the early 1900’s.

B-A Note: Someone had better hide my credit card. I need these. But it did remind me that I had this entry on Hodgson in the queue over at Book-Aesthete: Contemporary that needed to be published.

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Rat Catching - Smith (Robert) The Universal Dictionary for Taking Alive and Destroying Rats, and all other kinds of Four-Footed and Winged Vermin,
1768.

First edition, 6 engraved plates,

B-A note: I selected this book, not just because of the novelty of a Dictonary of Catching Rats, but because the auction it was listed in had 14 auction lots totalling no less than 25 rat- and other vermin-catching books ranging in publication date from 1668 to 2001. It seemed an odd thing to collect. But I suppose there are many strange collections in the world.

Edit: Make that an ironic 15. While not actually about rat-catching, this was listed in the same auction. Hee.

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Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Corporation
Advertising booklet
Garden City, Long Island, NY, c.1920

32 pp. Illustrations from photographs. 15.5x8.5 cm. (6x3¼”) original wrappers.
Scarce advertising piece for Curtiss bi-planes. Includes a list of notable Curtiss achievements. Rubber-stamp of the Philadelphia distributor inside front cover.

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(Smith, Jessie Willcox)
Author: Crothers, Samuel McChord
Title: The Children of Dickens
Place: New York
Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons
Date: 1925

viii, 259 pp. 10 color plates by Jessie Willcox Smith. (Large 8vo) black cloth, illustrated paper label on front, dust jacket. First Edition Thus.

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The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle. London: George Newnes, 1902.

A Fine First Edition ‘Hound’ in the Original Cloth. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes. First edition in book form (first serialized in the Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902). Small octavo (7 1/4 x 4 3/4 inches; 184 x 122 mm.). [8], 358, [1], [1, blank] pp. With sixteen plates (including frontispiece) by Sidney Paget. Original scarlet cloth pictorially stamped in gilt and black (in a design by Alfred Garth Jones) and lettered in gilt on front cover and pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt on spine.

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Historia insectorum generalis, in qua verissimae mutationum, seu lentae in membra epigeneseos rationes, duce Experientia, redduntur, recepta vulgo Insectorum Metamorphosis solide refutatur… Adjicitur dilucidatio … Editio Nova.

Re-issue of the rare Latin translation first published in Utrecht, by Meinardus van Dreunen in 1684, of Swammerdam’s famous work on the metamorphosis of insects. The original Dutch edition was published in 1669 also by Van Dreunen.

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Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books.
John Milton. London: Pr. by Miles Flesher for Jacob Tonson, 1688.

“The fourth edition, adorn’d with sculptures” — that is to say,the first illustrated appearance of Paradise Lost, as well as what Hodnett calls “the earliest serious effort to illustrate an important work of English poetry” — andthe first folio edition to boot — Pforzheimer noting that this is additionally the first publication of Dryden’s lines on Milton.

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Little Brother & Little Sister
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1917.

Bound by Bayntun-Riviere c. 1965. One of 525 Copies Signed by the Artist. Limited to 525 copies signed by the artist, this being copy no. 259. Quarto. Thirteen tipped-in color plates, forty-three black and white text illustrations. Bound by Bayntun-Riviere c. 1965 in full midnight green morocco with inlaid pictorial central panel reproducing the color-plate “She Begged Quite Prettily to be Allowed to Spend the Night There” (opposite p. 206) in gilt-tooled frame within triple gilt-ruled borders and large, gilt foliate corner-pieces. Gilt rolled edges. Broad, gilt dentelles. Gilt decorated compartments. All edges gilt.