JAMES CUMMINs bookseller Catalogue 135 Catalogue 135 | 1 JAMES CUMMINS bookseller Catalogue 135 I. Literature 1 II. Bibles and Other Devotional Works 44 III. Americana 50 IV. Travel, History & Economics 63 V. Private Press, Illustrated & Fine Bindings 79 VI. Bibliography 95 To place your order, call, write, e-mail or fax: james cummins bookseller 699 Madison Avenue, New York City, 10065 Telephone (212) 688-6441 Fax (212) 688-6192 [email protected] jamescumminsbookseller.com hours: Monday – Friday 10:00 – 6:00, Saturday 10:00 – 5:00 Member ABAA, ILAB front cover: item 7 inside front cover: item 81 inside rear cover: item 83 rear cover: item 109 photography by nicole neenan terms of payment: All items, as usual, are guaranteed as described and are returnable within 10 days for any reason. All books are shipped UPS (please provide a street address) unless otherwise requested. Overseas orders should specify a shipping preference. All postage is extra. New clients are requested to send remittance with orders. Libraries may apply for deferred billing. All New York and New Jersey residents must add the appropriate sales tax. We accept American Express, Master Card, and Visa. literature 1] [ANONYMOUS] Le Père Avare, ou Les Malheurs de L’Education; Contenant une idée de ceux de la Colonie de l’Isle de C***. Paris: Desventes de Ladoué, 1770 xvi, 359, [iii]; 334; 360 pp. 3 vols. 12mo. First edition. Bound in full contemporary mottled calf. With the bookplate of the Vicomte de Noailles (engraved by Agry) in each volume. Upper joint of vol. III with short start at foot, otherwise a fine and fresh copy. OCLC records two copies in N. America (Princeton, UCLA), two in France, and one at Trinity College, Dublin. A satirical response to Rousseau’s Emile ou l’Education (1762). Where Émile is guided by a wise tutor, the author of Le Père avare mocks from the outset Rousseau’s dictum “le véritable précepteur est le père,” for the narrator’s father M. d’Erigny grew up poor and gained wealth through his friendship with a government minister; his child has been spoiled from infancy. While M. d’Erigny is drunk, his mistress gets him to sign an colony to rescue him but falls afoul of the corrupt Intendant, order from her jeweler for 20,000 francs of precious stones and her health fails her. She dies, but not before she has made and skips out. The extravagance is discovered, and the father him her legatee. The narrator assists the colonial governor in becomes miserly in the extreme. The son, now 15 years old, prosecuting the Intendant and returns to France. He retires is entrusted to an unscrupulous précepteur, or tutor, who to a rural abbey and contemplates his experiences. Before involves the youth in a swindle and vanishes with the money. long he becomes the benefactor of a village community and This is a confessional, so we learn it all: the narrator soon sees it thrive. discovers love and devotes himself to pleasure, using the Only edition of this little-known work of fiction, set partly in family name to run up accounts everywhere before being the Americas. deceived and fleeced. M. d’Erigny is furious; Madame intercedes: his debts are paid, and he is sent off to exile in $5,000 a provincial town. He is befriended by a well-connected gentleman but repays this trust with deceit. Besotted with an actress, he forges a criminal denunciation of a rival, but his scheme is discovered and he is consigned to “une de ces maisons de force,” a private prison for the reform of licentious youth. To escape this close confinement, the narrator embarks with a flotilla of colonists bound for the island of C*** in the new world. His mother’s continued good influence follows him across the ocean, cushioning him from the worst excesses of a brutal colonial regime (amply detailed). Florainville, a mistress who has managed her money well, comes to the 2] ARNOLD, Matthew Alaric at Rome. A Prize Poem, Recited in Rugby School, June XII, MDCCCXL. Rugby: Combe and Crossley, 1840 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s printed pink wrappers. Faint vertical crease at center, light edgewear. In custom red morocco pull-off case. Ashley I, p. 8: “holds a high place in the rank of modern poetical rarities”; Hayward 255; Smart, p. 1. Provenance: Dr. J.B. Clemens of New Jersey (two typed letters to Clemens, as prospective purchaser of the book, from Luthur S. Livingston of Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, dated 17 August and 7 September, 1905, loosely inserted); sold Parke- Bernet, New York, 8 January 1945, lot 57 for $400; exhibited: Grolier Club (1950s exhibition card describing this as “the only presentation copy known”); sold, Halsted B. Vander Poel (Christie’s, London March 3, 2004, lot 127). Arnold’s Debut, Inscribed The first edition of Matthew Arnold’s first work, his Rugby School prize poem on the conquest of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric I in 410 AD. Unusual for a prize poem, the work was published anonymously and was not identified as Arnold’s until Edmund Gosse made the attribution in 1888. One of the rarest literary debuts, of which Wise noted, “Alaric at Rome holds a high place in the rank of modern poetical rarities.” This copy inscribed on the front wrapper, “E. Armitage Esqr. from the Author.” The recipient, Edward Armitage, was a fellow pupil at Rugby. Arnold had entered Rugby in 1837, where his father was headmaster. The only other copy known to bear an inscription by Arnold (“Miss Ward, 1840”) is at the Morgan Library. It is difficult to take an accurate census of copies, as Wise muddied the waters with his facsimile — which he later passed off as genuine. OCLC locates 15 copies and ABPC lists two copies — one in 1979 at Christie’s London, and the present copy. $60,000 2 | James Cummins bookseller literature 3] 4] BARETTI, Joseph BLAKE, William A Journey from London to Genoa, Through There Is No Natural Religion. London: Pickering England, Portugal, Spain, and France. London: T. & Co, 1886 Davies … and L. Davis, 1770 12 lithographic facsimiles printed in light brown and vii, [i], 306; [ii], 320; [ii], 319, [1]; [ii], 311, [1], [12, index] pp. highlighted in black (3 with additional hand-coloring). 8vo. 8vo. First English edition. Contemporary calf, spines Privately printed large paper copy, one of 50 copies. gilt, contrasting lettering pieces (the spine numbering Near contemporary red morocco by Riviere, with original incorrect). Extremities rubbed, some toning to text. ESTC printed wrappers bound-in. Rear cover detached. Keynes T83926; Courtney, p. 99. 218. A work suggested by Baretti’s friend Samuel Johnson; A privately printed lithographic facsimile of portions of “It was he that exhorted me to write daily and with all Blake’s There is No Natural Religion — a series of illustrated possible minuteness: it was he that pointed out the topics aphorisms, composed and printed by Blake around 1788 which would most interest and most delight in a future but not issued in his lifetime. publication. To his injunctions I have kept as close as I was This Pickering facsimile not to be confused with the able” (from the Preface). William Muir edition of the same year. Scarce, with the $800 last copy at auction appearing in 1997. $1,500 Catalogue 135 | 3 5] BLIXEN, Karen [Isak Dinesen] Vinter-Eventyr. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel / Nordisk Forlag, 1942 332 pp. 8vo. First edition. Original blue and white wrappers. Faint spotting to wrappers, faint creasing to spine, tiny tear to rear flap, but an attractive, near fine copy, in a custom cloth box. Henriksen 63. ‘Navigare necesse est …’ Signed with Blixen’s personal motto Signed on the half-title, with the motto Blixen adopted as a youth: “Karen Blixen.– Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.” (To sail is necessary, to live is not necessary.) The famous quote is attributed to Pompey, who exhorted his sailors to undertake a journey to bring grain from Africa to Rome during a fierce storm. In her essay “On Mottoes of My Life,” Blixen writes that it was “the first real motto of my youth … It came naturally to me to view my enterprise in life in terms of seafaring, for my home stands but a hundred yards from the sea, and through all the summers of our youth my brothers had boats in the fairways between Copenhagen and Elsinore … No compass-needle in the world was as infallible to me as the outstretched arm of Pompey; I steered my course by it with unswerving confidence, and had any wiser person insisted that there was no earthly sense in my motto, I might have answered: ‘Nay, but a heavenly sense!’ and have added perhaps: ‘And a maritime!’” (Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (1984), pp. 5-6). This collection of short stories was originally written and published in Danish during the height of the Second World War, with the English edition appearing the same year, as Winter’s Tales. $2,250 4 | James Cummins bookseller literature 6] BOCCACCIO, Giovanni [The Decameron] The Modell of Wit, Mirth, Eloquence and Conversation. Framed in Ten Dayes of an Hundred Curious Pieces [bound with:] The Decameron. Containing an Hundred Pleasant Novels … The Last Five Dayes. London: Isaac Jaggard, 1625; 1620 Vol. I woodcut title border [McKerrow & Ferguson 212], vol. II border of six woodcuts, repeated throughout text. Collation: A6(–A1, blank) B-V6 2A8 2B-2N6(–N6, blank); π4(–π1, blank) ¶-2¶4 3¶2 B-2Z4 3A6. 4to. First complete English edition (second edition of the first volume, first edition of the second volume).