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death finds a biographer worthy of his memory. Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Paddy” to all his acquaintances and half his readers, died last year to a plethora of obituaries, and his life has been so widely celebrated in print, in film and in legend that the task of writing another 400 pages about him would seem, as he might himself say, Sisyphean. Artemis Cooper, however, rolls the immense boulder with an apparently effortless grace, and makes this marvellous book less a mere life story than an evocation [...] He is justly commemorated in this magnificent biography’ (6 November 2012).
102. FIELDS, Gracie. Sing As We Go. Her Autobiography. Frederick Muller Limited. 1960.
£98 8vo., original cloth with dust wrapper. A near fine copy.
First edition inscribed by Fields on the title-page “To Roger my good wishes, Gracie Fields”. With a signed black and white photograph of Fields tipped in.
103. [FIELDS, James Thomas (editor).] The Boston Book. Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature. Boston: Thurston, Torry and Company for Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, ‘1850’ [but 1849].
£75
12mo (194 x 117mm). Original red cloth gilt, boards with central gilt vignettes of roses enclosed within floral sprays, elaborate borders blocked in blind, spine blocked in gilt with cartouche enclosing title and foliate sprays, all edges gilt, lemon-yellow endpapers; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 364; engraved additional title by J. Andrews and J.A. Ralph after H. Billings, retaining tissue guard, and wood-engraved tailpiece; cloth slightly marked, extremities slightly rubbed and chipped, light browning on endpapers, additional title spotted, some light browning, otherwise a very good copy; provenance: [?]Bradley’s (indistinct [?bookseller’s or binder’s] blindstamp on front free endpaper, possibly of the binder Benjamin Bradley, Boston) — loosely-inserted typed bookseller’s description — Percy Whiting Brown.
First edition. The first volume of Boston Bookwas published in 1836 and edited by Henry T. Zuckerman; the second in 1837, edited by Benjamin B. Thatcher; and the third in 1841, edited by George S. Hillard. This fourth issue — ‘A new volume having been very generally called for, and as some years have elapsed since the last one was issued, a continuation of the series is deemed desirable’ (p. [iii]) — was edited by the celebrated publisher, editor, writer, and lecturer James T. Fields (1817-1881). Fields, whose influence upon American literature extended well beyond his native Boston, had established his reputation as a ‘writers’ publisher’ by publishing the works of English authors including Dickens, Tennyson, de Quincey, and George Eliot on terms favourable to the authors, and his American writers were similarly distinguished; at this time, Fields was persuading Nathaniel Hawthorne to finish the text that would become The Scarlet Letter and be published by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields in 1850. Consequently, Fields was able to assemble a remarkable roster of writers for the 1850 Boston Book, including Oliver Wendell Holmes (who contributed ‘Boston Church Bells’ and ‘The Morning Visit’, the first publication of the poem), Nathaniel Hawthorne (‘Drowne’s Wooden Image’), James Russell Lowell (‘The Syrens’), John Greenleaf Whittier (‘Kathleen’ and ‘The Yankee Zincali’), Henry W. Longfellow (‘Resignation’, probably the first publication of the poem, unless preceded by its appearance in The Seaside and the Fireside (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850) and ‘Footprints of Angels’), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (‘Nature’ and ‘Concord Monument’), and Fields himself contributed the poem ‘On a Book of Sea-Mosses’ (p. 239). The American National
Biography Online comments that his authors ‘all knew [that] Fields hired Boston’s best printers and bookbinders and maintained high production standards, and no publisher was a more skillful marketer. Even writers who could command higher fees from other publishers contracted with Ticknor & Fields. For reader and writer alike, the firm’s imprint was a mark of quality’, and the production of this volume bears out the statement. Although the title-page is dated 1850, BAL notes that it was deposited on 20 November 1849, reviewed and listed in December 1849 and that Yale University Library holds a copy with an inscription dated 25 December 1849; Tilton and Clark both give the date of publication as 1 December 1849 and the latter states that 1,500 copies were printed.
BAL 5929; Clark, Hawthorne, C21; Tilton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, p. 561.
104. FISKE, John. Darwinism and other essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. [n.d., 1913].
£35
8vo. Original brown cloth and wrapper; pp. x + 367; dustwrapper a little browned to spine, otherwise near fine.
Later edition. John Fiske (1842-1901) was an American philosopher and historian who was best known as a populariser of Darwin’s work. His work was devoted to the philosophical implications of evolution, in which he was greatly influenced by Herbert Spencer, and was a regular correspondent with Darwin, who read and praised the first edition of this work in 1879.
105. FLEMING, Fergus. Killing Dragons. The Conquest of the Alps. London: Mackays of Chatham for Granta Books, 2000.
£27.50
8vo (232 x 151mm). Original blue boards, spine lettered in silver, light- blue endpapers, dustwrapper; pp. ix, [3 (double-page map and blank p.)], 398, [6 (blank)]; 8 plates with illustrations printed recto-and-verso, one double-page map; dustwrapper slightly creased at edges, corners lightly bumped, otherwise a very good copy.
First edition. Fleming’s widely-acclaimed history of alpine mountaineering, ranging from the pioneering figures of de Saussure and Bourrit in the eighteenth century, to the ascents of Harrer and others in the 1930s.
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