RaRe & Fine Books including Recent Acquisitions Rulon-Miller Books Saint Paul, MN Winter 2017 Rulon-Miller Books 400 Summit Avenue Saint Paul, MN 55102-2662 USA *** Catalogue 154 Rare & Fine Books Including Recent Acquisitions To order call toll-free (800) 441-0076 Outside the U.S. please call 1 (651) 290-0700 Email: [email protected] Web: rulon.com All major credit cards accepted We will gladly supply pictures for any item TERMS • All books are guaranteed genuine as described, and are returnable for any reason during the first week after receipt. Please notify us as soon as possible if an item is being returned, so that we might make it available to another customer. • Prices are net, plus sales taxes where applicable. Shipping charges are extra and are billed at cost. • Foreign accounts should make payments in US dollars by wire, credit card, or postal money order, or with a check in US dollars drawn on a US bank. Bank charges may apply. Note to our Readers While the NUC (National Union Catalogue) counts in our catalogue descriptions remain accurate, as well as those from other hard-copy sources, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) counts, and those from other online databases, may not be. While we have taken the time to check items in this catalogue where online counts are cited, and assume them to be correct, we also recognize that searches using different qualifiers will often turn up different results, and most all should probably be taken as measure of approximation. Cover Image: Item #396 Back Cover Image: Item: #62 Catalogue 154 1 Preface This catalogue is dedicated to the memory of Bob Fleck, words in a different context, and saw images through first and foremost my trusted friend and colleague, and a different lens. In this century in particular, these two by the way, also past-President of both ABAA and markets seem to have come smashing together, like our ILAB, and an ILAB President of Honor. I’m copying proverbial ship and growler — both yet happily afloat. him in on the following. Stunning examples of modern fine printing continue to Lest one think the front cover illustration of be editioned by passionate, talented, and gifted artists. this catalogue is emblematic of the antiquarian trade at I know many of them personally, and given the time large — and there are quite a few who would subscribe they spend on their productions, they get paid even less to this notion — I’m offering this short apologia for than booksellers do, which should tell you something. the optimists among us. Like booksellers, they do it because they love it, not Stories that the printed text is dead abound: the because they have any desire to get rich. Consequently, deleterious effect of digitization on our business; the they now compete for collectors’ and librarians’ dollars ubiquitous google supplanting our reference libraries; in a way I never would have expected two decades ago. the internet itself replacing the hard-won knowledge Even more markets loom. A new inductee of our youth. Yes, some would argue, the great ship into the ABAA exclusively offers contemporary art of our dreams has gone down to the bottom forever. bindings — each one absolutely unique. Take that, Anyone sell a Derrydale recently? Or a Howes a-item? you ephemeron! Move over, manuscripto! Anyone These folks have a point, to be sure. I can not coming to terms with these and other emerging even make the argument myself. Yet, we cling to the disciplines are likely to be left behind the slow, hanging life-rings which still float around us: ephemera, manu- curve of the marketplace. scripts, photograph albums, original illustration…and I’ve often wondered what Fanny Duschnes, books too, but only in their hyper state: true rarities; Warren Howell, or Jake Zeitlin might have said about interesting provenance; sublime bindings; annotated me and other younger booksellers back in the 1970s. texts; or the copy inscribed or somehow associated. Were we perceived in the same way as I now perceive And less enticing to me: the pristine, unread copy, or those who have carved out new areas of collecting right the so-called ‘highspots.’ in front of my eyes? Somehow, I doubt it. Yes, we were At the recent Boston Book Fair I was quite younger and more energetic than they, and certainly conscious of how many other booksellers were younger the modern first edition market took off in the 1960s than I, a lot younger in some cases. While I can’t speak and 70s and came into its unsustainable prime, in part to their results in Boston, or the health of their business- due to the hard work of my aging contemporaries. es overall, I can speak to their cheerfulness and their But I would argue that the book trade was infectious delight in being booksellers, and perhaps not as robust then as it is now — all one has to do is more importantly, being colleagues. As Director of witness the many new and divergent areas of collecting, the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, I see this in a or old areas of collecting which have been put into way perhaps most others don’t. Many students — men new contexts — not only by men, but now, more and women, young and old — who have come into than ever, by women too, a trend which is certainly to the trade have passed through CABS, and many are continue. What was once a trade largely run by white now seasonably entrenched, happily offering for sale males is morphing into a trade of gender equity, and I all sorts of unusual and interesting material, printed look forward to the future one of race equity as well. and otherwise, much of which yet confounds me. Whatever new and enlightened reality awaits will Many are of a new generation — two new generations, inevitably change how we interpret books and book actually — who see with newer, dreamier eyes, and culture in the future, just as it will also change what offer material I never even considered, let alone saw. we collect and study. Material which wasn’t even in existence when I started A titanic recalibration and reassessment is selling books in 1969 is now rigorously offered and already under weigh. I confess this has only come backed up by solid, scholarly research — material to me lately, but it seems we can now purposefully which now resonates with younger collectors and forage through the back alleys of everything which librarians. How can I do anything but sing all their has been printed and pick up whatever has been left praises and maybe try to learn a bit about what they’re lying in the gutter or confined to the dumpster. It’s a doing? wild and crazy world in there. Take your dive. Who For a number of years now modern fine printing knows what you might hit your head on? I am utterly has been in ascendency. Bob was all over this way optimistic about the future for all of us: booksellers, before most. When I first entered the trade that market printers, binders, collectors, librarians — anyone who seemed to live apart from the antiquarian one. I’m not has read and understood the memo, like Bob did a long talking about Kelmscott, Ashendene, and Doves here, time ago. but of printers and designers of my generation who grew up looking at books differently than I, who understood Rest in peace, Bob. Rob R-M 2 Rulon-Miller Books first published in Venice in 1612. Ebert 23848; Vancil, p. 2; this edition not noted by Zaunmuller. One of 12 copies with 2 Doves Press leaves on vellum 3. [Adagio Press.]. C-S The Master Craftsman. An account of the work of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson by Norman Strouse. Cobden Sanderson’s partnership with Emery Walker by John Dreyfus. Harper Woods, Michigan: Adagio Press, 1969. $3,500 Edition limited to approx. 329 copies printed by Leonard F. Bahr, this being one of only 12 copies (letter ‘D’) with both Doves Press leaves printed on 1. Abdu El-Yezdi, Haji. [Title in Arabic.] The vellum, and also one of 10 Kasidah (couplets) of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi: a lay of the copies to have one of the leaves higher law. Translated and annotated by his friend and with an illuminated initial by pupil, F[rancis] B[urton]. London: privately printed, Edward Johnston; signed by [1880]. $3,800 Bahr, Dreyfus, and Strouse on First edition, first issue; 4to, pp. [4], 33; original yellow the colophon; folio, pp. 54, printed wrappers bound in contemporary olive buckram mounted photograph of Walker lettered in gilt on upper cover; extremities browned, mild and Cobden-Sanderson laid in, red ink transfer on the upper wrap, a number of erudite as issued, printed in red, blue pencil annotations; very good copy. The first two issues of Item 3 and black throughout. Fine this title were published by Bernard Quaritch, the first issue copy in original vellum-backed omits the Quaritch name and the date from the title. The Cockerell paper-covered boards, original acetate dust jacket two issues together did not comprise more than 200 copies, with tear on the back panel. The best and most important “and Messrs. Quaritch state that under a hundred were sold.” work of the press in its rarest and most beautiful issue. Ostensibly translated by Burton, he in fact was its author; written in 1857 under his nom-de-plume Hâjî Abdû Al-Yazdi Signed by Adams but not published until 1880 by Quaritch.