USE BOOKS AS BEESUSE FLOWERS NO. 4 HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM 1 2 HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM 3 So, what kind of books are you looking for? Here at Honey & Wax, we get a lot of unsolicited book offers, some exciting, most less so, a few frankly deranged. I wish I could sum up the typical Honey & Wax book in one word: we buy and sell cookbooks, or atlases, or photography, full stop. Even modern first editions would simplify matters. But in truth, the qualities of a Honey & Wax book are harder to define. As Justice Stewart remarked of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” And I know how I feel when I spot a Honey & Wax book: startled, arrested, curious. Awake. Mostly we deal in literature, but sometimes history and philosophy and art and music. Mostly books, but sometimes games and broadsides and manuscripts and maps. Mostly in English, but sometimes in other languages, ancient and modern. Almost always in excellent condition — and that requirement narrows the field — but our books have so much more going for them than their looks. Each one has something special to recommend it: imaginative writing, historical influence, an intriguing provenance or presentation, striking design. I know it when I see it, and when I see it, I want to share it. In this, our fourth catalog, we feature fifty-nine new acquisitions, from canonical landmarks to unexpected survivals. We hope that every reader — the most jaded collector, the world-weariest librarian — will be genuinely surprised and delighted by at least one book in these pages. Complete descriptions and additional images of these, and many other books, can be found at honeyandwaxbooks.com. Take a look. Give a call! And stop by the Honey & Wax bookroom, open by chance or appointment, if you find yourself in town. HEATHER O’DONNELL Brooklyn, New York [email protected] HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM 1 1 Massimo Vignelli; Bob Noorda. New York Subway Guide. 2 Miguel de Cervantes; E. McKnight Kauffer (illustrator), [Roger Fry]. New York: New York City Transit Authority, 1972. Color-printed map, 17.5 x 21 inches Don Quixote de la Mancha. unfolded. WITH: New York City Graphic Standards Manual. Vicenza: Standards London: Nonesuch Press, 1930. Two octavo volumes, publisher’s full morocco. Manual LLC, 2014. Large square folio, 13.5 x 13.5 inches, publisher’s red cloth. 21 color plates. Presentation inscription from E. McKnight Kauffer to Roger Fry. $2200. 176 color and monochrome plates, three folding. $750. Fine press edition of Cervantes’s great picaresque novel, limited to 1475 copies. 1972 first issue of Massimo Vignelli’s iconic New York City subway map, Originally issued in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote begins as a parody of accompanied by the deluxe facsimile reissue of the 1970 New York City Graphic chivalric romances, but expands to examine the whole of Spanish society through Standards Manual. In 1966, the design firm Unimark, founded by Massimo Vignelli the adventures of the deluded Quixote and his long-suffering companion Sancho and Bob Noorda, set out to unify the graphic elements of the vast New York City Panza. “A world of disorderly Notions, pick’d out of his Books, crouded into his subway system, a subterranean network cobbled together out of existing transit Imagination; and now his Head was full of nothing but Inchantments, Quarrels, lines, each with its own local signs and systems. Unimark’s proposal, presented Battles, Challenges, Wounds, Complaints, Amours, Torments, and abundance in the 1970 Graphic Standards Manual, laid the foundation for the crisp modern of Stuff and Impossibilities.” This copy is warmly inscribed by the illustrator: graphics of the New York subway: a bright color and letter for each line, and “for Roger Fry, without whose encouragement this book would not have been a clean sans-serif typeface (first Standard Medium, then Helvetica) across all done — E. McKnight Kauffer, 1930.” The preeminent English art critic of his stations. Vignelli’s streamlined, almost abstract subway map epitomized the day, Fry was instrumental in promoting Kauffer’s work through the Omega design innovations of the Unimark proposal, becoming one of the most instantly Workshops, the influential Bloomsbury design collective Fry directed with recognizable (and controversial) visual representations of the city. The map was Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; in 1925, Fry contributed the introduction to in production from 1972 to 1979; this copy is first issue, with the KK local line the printed catalogue of Kauffer’s modernist posters. A near-fine copy, with an still in service. Map and book fine. important English art historical association. 2 HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM 3 3 Ernestus Vaenius. Tractatus Physiologicus de Pulchritudine, Juxta ea quae de Sponsa in Canticis Canticorum Mysticè Pronunciantur. Brussels: F. Foppens, 1662. Small octavo, full eighteenth-century mottled calf gilt. Engraved title and 28 engravings in text. Text in Latin. $2800. First and only edition of this curious seventeenth-century treatise on female beauty, taking the figure of the bride in the Song of Songs as the feminine ideal. Each chapter opens with a Latin translation of one descriptive verse — “thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus,” “thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from Mount Gilead,” “thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins” — followed by an illustrated analysis. The striking, surreal engravings constitute the primary interest of the work, a comparative anatomy of birds, camels, horses, dogs, and conventionally attractive women. Most famous is the chapter explicating “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me” (Nolite me considerare quod fusca sim, quia decoloravit me Sol), in which Vaenius defends the beauty of the dark-skinned bride, and calls into question the “frigid” ideal of whiteness. A near-fine copy of an ambitious work, balancing the claims of anatomy, theology, and aesthetics. 4 The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to the Use of the Church of England: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, Pointed as They Are to be Sung or Said in Churches. Cambridge: John Baskerville, 1762. Octavo, full contemporary red morocco elaborately tooled in gilt. $2800. Third octavo edition of John Baskerville’s prayer book, handsomely printed in Roman and italic types, and priced at “Eight Shillings and Sixpence, unbound” on the title page. Contents include English church calendars and tables, prayers and psalms, services and sacraments: “nothing is ordained to be read, but the very pure Word of God, the holy Scripture, or that which is agreeable to the same; and that in such Language and Order as is most easy and plain for the understanding both of the Readers and Hearers.” This copy is complete with the occasional prayers, “printed for only a part of the edition,” and with the reference to George III’s new queen, Charlotte, in the royal prayers. Of particular interest is the unusual and striking binding, featuring precise horizontal tooling executed within a framed central lozenge, apparently an English variant on the Scottish “herring-bone” bindings of the period. 4 HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM 5 6 HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM 7 PREVIOUS PAGES 5 Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard. Etruskische und Kampanische Vasenbilder des Königlichen Museums zu Berlin. Berlin: Verlag von G. Reimer, 1843. Imperial folio, 21 x 14.5 inches, contemporary calf over marbled blue paper boards. Thirty color and five monochrome plates. Library label of the Duc de Luynes. Text in German. $9000. First edition of Eduard Gerhard’s massive survey of ancient Etruscan and Campanian vase paintings in the museums of Berlin, illustrated with thirty brilliant color lithographs in terracotta, red, and black. Head archaeologist at the Royal Museum of Berlin, Gerhard was a co-founder of the first international archaeological society, Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, and a tireless cataloguer and classifier of antiquities. This volume reproduces scenes found on ancient vases throughout Italy, featuring the legends of Ariadne, Hercules, Achilles, Aegisthos, and the Calydonian hunt, among others; particularly moving is the image of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of the ruins of Troy. The oversized color plates are sharp and vivid, as though just printed. From the library of Honoré d’Albert, 8th Duc de Luynes, noted nineteenth-century French archaeologist and collector of antiquities, who donated his own collection of ancient vases to the Cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. FOLLOWING PAGE 6 George Eliot. The Writings of George Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. Twenty-five octavo volumes, contemporary full blue morocco gilt. Photogravures throughout text, many in color. Autograph letter signed by George Eliot as M.E. Lewes tipped into Volume I. $7500. Illustrated large-paper edition of Eliot’s writings, number 10 of 750 copies, handsomely bound at the Riverside Press. This set includes Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Daniel Deronda, and Middlemarch, as well as Eliot’s poems, essays, letters, and journals. Tipped into the first volume is a four-page letter, dated April 1873, written on Eliot’s house stationery at The Priory, Regent’s Park. Inquiring on behalf of herself and her longtime companion, George Henry Lewes, Eliot seeks a country house for the fall: “The search for a house is always a difficulty, the precise thing one needs seeming of course to be the rarest kind . We desire perfect seclusion & yet nearness to a town — what is our house, in fact, only that our scale would be much smaller.” The couple would eventually let a house called Blackbrook in Kent, which despite its idyllic location proved inconvenient.