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FROM THE AUTHOR’S LIBRARY
42. BROWN, Percy Whiting. History of Rowe, Massachusetts. [?Boston]: ‘Privately Printed’ by The Old Colony Press, Boston [?for the author], 1921.
£125
8vo (239 x 154mm). Original green cloth, boards with blind-ruled borders, spine lettered in gilt, top and fore- edges trimmed, lower edges uncut; pp. [2 (blank l.)], [4 (title, imprint on verso, prefatory note)], 116, [6 (blank ll.)]; half- tone
photographic
43. BURKE, James Lee. White Doves at Morning. A Novel of the American Civil War. Orion. 2003.
£48
8vo., original cloth with dustwrapper. A fine copy. First UK edition with publisher’s label signed by Burke on title-page.
44. BURTON, Richard. A Christmas Story. New York. William Morrow. 1964.
£48
Slim 8vo., original cloth backed paper covered boards with dust wrapper. Illustrated by Lydia Fruhauf. A very good copy.
frontispiece;
extremities very slightly rubbed and bumped, small marks on boards, otherwise a very good copy; provenance: Percy Whiting Brown.
First edition, privately printed. Percy Whiting Brown’s parents had spent summers in Rowe when he was a child, and became so attached to the town that they bought some land there in 1899 and built a holiday home, Rocky Knoll,
which was completed in 1900. Rowe exercised a strong hold over Brown throughout his life, and he demonstrated his great affection for it in the last decade of his life by purchasing Pelham Lake and four hundred acres of parkland, and gifting them to the town. As Brown explains in his prefatory note, ‘For many years the writer has had a great love for the Rowe hills, and in his many walks and drives has accumulated items of both historical and personal interest. The sight of an old cellar-hole with its pink fire- weed and neighboring lilac bush has always held a solemn fascination, and has brought up pictures of a once happy family [...] Then too, the roads became a subject for study; how the earliest highways were laid out in straight lines with little regard for hill summits, and how an early philosopher fetched a kettle to town meeting to prove that the distance around a hill was no greater than over it. The interest of the village school teacher in Rowe’s early history and her efforts to arouse the same interest in her pupils, have been the stimulus for setting down these items on paper, in the hope that thereby their love for their native town will be increased’. The bibliography of sources consulted includes M.A. Smith’s Amid Rowe Hills. Although, presumably, this privately-issued first edition was not printed in large numbers, Brown’s work established itself as the standard history, and demand for new editions continued through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first; a second edition was published in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935, a third edition in Rowe, Massachusetts by the Town of Rowe in 1960, and a fourth edition in Rowe by the Rowe Historical Society in 2006 (these last two editions enlarged with the addition of material by other authors).
First edition. “Richard Burton has been quoted as saying he would rather be a writer than an actor. A Christmas Story is singular proof that the ambition is not misplaced. It is a truly memorable tale that will seize and hold the heart of every reader”.
45. BURTON, Robert. Anatomy of Melancholy, what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it. George McCorquodale & Co. for William Tegg & Co., 1849. £298
4to, full Divinity calf by J. Wright, boards with broad borders of parallel, double, blind-ruled fillets with fleuron corner-pieces all enclosing blind strapwork corner-pieces, spine with contrasting morocco lettering piece in one compartment, others with central gilt-tooled fleuron, blind roll-tooled board edges, blind roll-tooled turn-ins, marbled endpapers, all edges red; engraved frontispiece, engraved additional titles after original frontispiece; an internally clean copy in a handsome binding; provenance Edward Cane (his armorial bookplate on upper pastedown).
A new edition, corrected and enriched by translation of the numerous classical extracts. The binding is signed by John Wright, who was described by Ramsden as “a binder of the highest order” (Ramsden, London Bookbinders, p.154).
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