James S. Jaffe Rare Books LLC

03/15/2024

Our latest list, devoted to manuscripts, letters and inscribed books by Rainer Maria Rilke, can be found here: https://jamesjaffe.cdn.bibliopolis.com/images/upload/rainer-maria-rilke-list.pdf?auto=webp

01/19/2022

We are pleased to announce our latest catalogue devoted to Jonathan Williams and The Jargon Society.
A comprehensive selection of their publications, this 233-page illustrated catalogue offers over 550 items, including books, manuscripts, letters, photographs and ephemera.
We regret there is no digital version.

11/26/2020

Ever since Kim Merker’s Windhover Press published For the Occasion of Death in 1980, I’ve kept this beautiful poetic memento mori within reach. An anthology of poems written on the eve of each poet’s ex*****on, this little book includes poems by Hideki Tojo, executed on the 23rd of December, 1948; Sir Walter Ralegh, executed on the 29th of October, 1618; Tomoyuki Yamash*ta, executed on the 23rd of February, 1946; and Chidiock Tichborne, executed on the 20th of September, 1586. The printing is as exquisite as the poems. On this Thanksgiving Day, in this grievous year, I wish you all a keen sense of the swiftness of time, the wisdom to use it wisely, and the love to transcend it.

10/28/2019

“I respond to an artist who has seemed to me incorruptible, who dedicated a difficult and painful life to the worship and nurture of the imagination, and who, despite the evidence of history, insisted always that there was in human nature something fine and bright and sure. He knew his mind, spoke out against mistrust and injustice, and championed, it seemed, some ancient marriage of flesh and spirit we had let ourselves forget. His was an often noble and powerful voice that called to community the waifs and runaways of two alienated generations. In all of this, he was a very heroic and lovely man.” – Raymond Nelson, Kenneth Patchen and American Mysticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, (1984).

07/20/2019

"Black Mountain was not something you grew out of. Like freedom, you grew into it." - Fielding Dawson

09/05/2017

TWENTY-SIX POEMS, ONE OF TEN COPIES PRINTED ON JAPAN VELLUM, WITH ORIGINAL PEN-AND-INK DRAWINGS BY DYLAN AND CAITLIN THOMAS

THOMAS, Dylan. Twenty-Six Poems. 4to, original quarter vellum & boards, publisher’s slipcase. (NY & London: James Laughlin & J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1949). First edition, deluxe issue. One of only 10 copies printed on Japan vellum, out of a total edition of 150 copies printed by Hans Mardersteig at the Officina Bodoni in Verona, Italy, and signed by Thomas. The ten copies on Japan vellum were divided between the publisher and the poet, the present copy being copy number five [V], one of the poet’s own copies, bearing his ownership signature and address on the rear endsheet: “Dylan / Boat House / Laugharne / Carmarthenshire / Wales.” The bibliographer suggests that: “the vellum copies preceded the hand-made paper issue by about two days.” Rolph B13. Schmoller 94. Barr 48 (regular issue). Twenty-Six Poems is a selection of Thomas’s best poems, including “I see the boys of summer”, “After the funeral”, “The hand that signed the paper”, “There was a saviour”, “Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait”, “Deaths and Entrances”, “Fern Hill”, “A Refusal to Mourn”, “In my craft and sullen art”, and “In Country Sleep”, among others.
Presentation copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper by Thomas to the Asian American poet José Garcia Villa: “To José Garcia Villa from Dylan Thomas”. Thomas’s inscription is followed on a later blank page by a pen-and-ink drawing by Thomas bearing the caption “Who is Love” and the inscription “from Dylan with affection, May 1953.” In addition, at the back of the book, there is a pen-and-ink portrait of José Garcia Villa by Caitlin Thomas, which is signed “Villa by Caitlin”.
At the time this book was published, Garcia Villa was an associate editor at New Directions, whose publisher James Laughlin co-published this book. Laughlin was delighted with Garcia Villa when he first met him: “Marvelous little guy. Like an affectionate squirrel. . . . He worships Cummings, which puts him in good with me.” – Ian S. MacNiven, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions ((N. Y.: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014), p. 196. Garcia Villa owned copy number 106 of the regular issue of Twenty-Six Poems, also inscribed to him by Thomas. Although it is unlikely Garcia Villa could afford to buy Twenty-Six Poems at the time, it is possible that Laughlin gave him a copy of the regular issue, perhaps as a bonus, or allowed him to purchase a copy at a low price. As for Thomas’s own copy of the deluxe issue, Thomas may have given it to Garcia Villa, or may have offered to sell him this copy during the early 1950s when the poet was touring America and felt desperate to raise money. It should be noted that it is for his love poetry that José Garcia Villa is perhaps best known today.
Moreover, and most importantly, there is an additional pen-and-ink drawing by Caitlin on the page facing the colophon, a picture of “Dylan & me”, with the figure of Caitlin labeled “wife”, and the figure of Thomas labeled “D. T.s”. Above the drawing is an inscription in Caitlin’s hand reading “on George Reavey’s Nth birthday, May 4, 1952 at Irene Rice-Perieira’s and George Reavey’s apt.” The date is subsequently corrected: “Really 1st May”. At the time Reavey and his wife, the artist Irene Rice-Pereira, lived on West 15th St. in New York. Below the inscription are the signatures of those who were present at the party, including Dylan Thomas, Oscar Williams, Irene Rice-Pereira, and David Lougée [“one of Dylan’s first American friends” – John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1955), p. 278].
Caitlin joined Dylan for his second tour of America in 1952, and the inscriptions and drawings in this book, with the exception of Thomas’s ownership signature and address at the back, probably all date from the birthday party at Reavey’s house in May 1952, when Caitlin would have drawn the self-portrait of herself and Dylan, and the portrait of Garcia Villa, and when their friends signed the book. It is possible, of course, that Dylan could have met Garcia Villa again in May 1953, separately, and added the drawing and inscription to him then, but it seems more likely that he simply misdated the inscription at the time of Reavey’s party the previous year.
Caitlin did not accompany Dylan on his third tour of America in April/May 1953, and only returned to America on November 5, during Dylan’s fourth tour, after learning that Dylan had been hospitalized in New York. Thomas died on November 9, without having awakened from a coma, while Caitlin was recovering from a nervous breakdown at the River Crest Sanitarium on Long Island. Originally attributed to acute alcohol poisoning, the cause of Thomas’s death is now believed to have been severe bronchopneumonia, which went undiagnosed and untreated – that is to say, mistreated – at the time.
When Thomas was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital on November 5, “the simmering rivalry between Dylan’s local friends flared into open hostility. On the one hand was a definite inner circle centred on these three [John Malcolm Brinnin, Ruthven Todd and Liz Reitell, John Malcolm Brinnin’s assistant, with whom Thomas was having an affair] and the Slivkas [David and Rose]; on the other, a group, headed by George Reavey and Oscar Williams, who felt excluded. As well as being closer to Caitlin, they considered they had known Dylan longer and were the true guardians of his interests, literary and otherwise.” – Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (Woodstock & NY: Overlook Press, 2003), p. 370.
Artifacts like the present copy of Twenty-Six Poems seem all the more precious for commemorating the less conspicuous – because less self-consciously self-promoted – but no less important circle of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas’s friends in New York City.
Although Dylan Thomas’s impromptu impulse to add caricatures of himself and his friends to copies of his books is familiar to collectors, Caitlin’s impromptu drawings are less well known. However, Ferris notes her “own brand of wild caricature” and mentions her impulse, “unnervingly, in her more uncommunicative moods, (to) take out her notebook and begin sketching everyone around her.” – Ferris, p. 324.
A fabulous copy of Dylan Thomas’s rarest book.

07/19/2017

Jonathan Williams festschrift available in August. Celebrate the marvelous man who gave so much to so many of us by ordering your copy today.

03/14/2017

[WOOLF, Virginia] BELL, Vanessa. Original gouache painting for the dust jacket design for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, 8 x 5 ¼ inches, unsigned and undated but 1925. A preliminary design for the dust jacket, with the basic design more or less determined, but appearing as a rectilinear silhouette of a crowned head. Before the final published version was printed, Bell rendered the design softer, more rounded and abstract, and brighter with the addition of the color yellow. The published version is also printed in black, rather than in black and brown, with yellow accents surrounding the central design, and with a bouquet of yellow flowers in the lower portion of the design where the artist eventually added her initials (not present here). Provenance: on the back of the frame is the label of Anthony d’Offay, 9 Dering Street, New Bond Street, London, with a typed note: “Purchased by Mr John Grover 1975.” The present design was included in d’Offay’s exhibition entitled Vanessa Bell: Paintings and Drawings, 20 November to 12 December 1973, where it is listed as number 19.

04/04/2016

03/25/2016

http://www.abaa.org/events/details/56th-annual-new-york-antiquarian-book-fair

From April 7-10, 2016 book lovers will find a fascinating treasure trove at the Park Avenue Armory. Over 200 American and international dealers will exhibit at The ABAA New York Antiquarian Book Fair, bringing a vast selection of rare books, maps, manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts and ephemera. T…

12/12/2015

We are pleased to announce our new catalogue of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Literary Art, which includes original manuscripts by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton; inscribed books by Nathaniel Hawthorne; original art by Morris Cox of the Gogmagog Press; archives and letters by John Cheever and David Markson; comprehensive collections of works by Phillip Levine and Gore Vidal; and first editions by James Agee, John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Bishop, Kate Chopin, Cyril Connolly, Miguel Covarrubias, William Everson, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, James Joyce, Primo Levi, Robert McAlmon, Thomas Mann, Herman Melville, Paul Muldoon, Robert Musil, George Orwell, Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, James Schuyler, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats, many of them signed or inscribed. Available on our website:http://www.jamesjaffe.com/images/upload/fall-winter-catalogue-2015.pdf

10/19/2015

DOYLE, Sir Arthur Conan. The Medal of Brigadier Gerard. Original holograph manuscript, 41 pages written on rectos only on ruled paper, revised and corrected, signed at the end “A Conan Doyle, 12 Tennison Road, South Norwood”; 7 x 9 inches, bound in contemporary three-quarter calf and marbled paper over boards, marbled endpapers, with a printed half-title; presentation inscription on a preliminary blank: “Presented to Herbert F. Gunnison with the warm regards of Irving Bacheller”; with the bookplate of Herbert Foster Gunnison on the front pastedown. [Together with:] “How the King held the Brigadier”, original holograph manuscript, 26 pages, folio & 8vo, revised and corrected, and signed at the end “A Conan Doyle, Belvedere Hotel, Davos Platz”; [Bound with:] “How the Brigadier slew the Brothers of Ajaccio”, original holograph manuscript, 24 pages, folio & 8vo, revised and corrected, and signed at the end “A Conan Doyle, Belvedere Hotel, Davos Platz, Switzerland”; [Bound with:] “How the Brigadier came to the Castle of Gloom”, original holograph manuscript, 21 pages, folio & 8vo, revised and corrected, and signed at the end “A Conan Doyle, Belvedere, Davos Platz”; [Bound with:] “How the Brigadier played for a Kingdom”, original holograph manuscript, 23 pages, folio, revised and corrected, and signed at the end “A Conan Doyle, Belvedere Hotel, Davos Platz, May 31/95”; the four manuscripts bound together in contemporary three-quarter calf and marbled paper over boards, marbled endpapers, 8 ½ x 13 ½ inches, with a printed half-title; presentation inscription on a preliminary blank: “Presented to Herbert F. Gunnison with warm regards of Irving Bacheller”; with the bookplate of Herbert Foster Gunnison on the front pastedown.
“The Medal of Brigadier Gerard”, here first titled “The Mission of Brigadier Gerard”, with the word “Mission” crossed out and the word “Medal” written above, was written in 1894 and is the first short story in Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard saga. In their account of Conan Doyle’s serial publications, his bibliographers Green and Gibson give both the English title “‘How the Brigadier Won His Medal’”, and the American title “‘The Medal of the Brigadier’”, as the story was originally published in the separate English and American issues of the Strand magazine in 1894. Green and Gibson also note that the first American periodical publication was by a Newspaper Syndicate [abbreviation “N.S.”, G & G, p. 404], referring to the Bacheller Syndicate. As noted above, the present manuscripts were given by Bacheller to his friend and fellow journalist Herbert Foster Gunnison. Irving Bacheller (1859-1950), author, journalist and editor, began his career as a journalist in Brooklyn in 1882, but a few years later founded the first modern American newspaper syndicate, the Bacheller Syndicate, to provide literature and other articles to Sunday newspapers. Among the authors whose work he represented were Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling. In the 1890s, Bacheller began to write fiction and gave up his career in journalism to pursue literature, becoming a best-selling author with such works as Eben Holden (1900), D’ri and I (1901), The Light in the Clearing (1917), and A Man for the Ages (1920).
Herbert Foster Gunnison (1858-1932) was a Brooklyn newspaperman associated with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he worked from 1882, eventually becoming its President in 1924.
In 1894, the indefatigable American impresario Major James Pond organized a lecture tour for Conan Doyle, who arrived in New York on October 2 and appeared in thirty cities before returning to England on December 8th. It was on this tour and in this way that Conan Doyle introduced Brigadier Gerard to the public, first in America, in advance of its periodical publication in the Strand later the same year. “Conan Doyle had read it [“‘How the Brigadier Won His Medal,’ the new character’s debut”] aloud to audiences in America, whose generous responses encouraged him to think he had a success on his hands. . . . he quickly turned out another seven adventures. These also appeared in the Strand throughout 1895, and were collected in book form as The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. Though Conan Doyle often dismissed this collection as his “little book of soldier stories,” Brigadier Gerard soon emerged as one of his most popular creations.” – Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (N. Y.: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 191.
“The Medal of Brigadier Gerard” was first published in book form in “The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard” under its original English title in 1896. The first American edition was published by D. Appleton and Company in the same year, and that edition cites Irving Bacheller as holding the American copyright to the stories. According to Green and Gibson, “The first story was written late in 1894, and the author read it during his lecture tour in America. It was published in the San Francisco Examiner and advertised as having cost 12 ½ cents a word.” G & G, A19, and p. 408. It is conceivable that Bacheller received this manuscript from the author at the end of Conan Doyle’s lecture tour in America in late 1894, or possibly after it was prepared for publication in England in December 1894.
“How the King held the Brigadier”, although bearing the author’s Roman numeral II at the top, was the third story in the series to be published. “How the Brigadier slew the Brothers of Ajaccio”, although bearing the Roman numeral III, was the fourth story in the series to be published. “How the Brigadier came to the Castle of Gloom”, although bearing the Roman numeral IV, and the notation: “Not to be published before July 7” in Bacheller’s hand, was the fifth story in the series to be published. “How the Brigadier played for a Kingdom”, bears the Roman numeral VIII and was the eighth story in the series to be published. All four of these stories were first published in the Strand magazine in 1895.
In 1892, Conan Doyle visited the English novelist and poet George Meredith, who introduced him to the memoirs of Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcellin de Marbot. Baron de Marbot’s Memoires had been published in France in 1844, and the first English translation appeared in 1892. Conan Doyle “came to regard it has “the first of all soldier books in the world. It required a certain “robust faith,” Conan Doyle allowed, to credit all of the Frenchman’s outlandish claims of bravery, but therein lay the book’s charm. De Marbot made such an impression that Conan Doyle transferred the French officer’s verve and vain-glorious manner into a new fictional hero, Brigadier Etienne Gerard of the Hussars of Conflans.” Stashower, pp. 190-191.
As Conan Doyle’s bibliographers note, “The author was very fond of these stories, which he found easy to write. He felt that they were accurate as a portrayal of the French soldiers of the period even down to the smallest details of the costumes and of the historical background. The first story was written late in 1894, and the author read it during his lecture tour in America. It was published in the San Francisco Examiner.” – Green & Gibson, p. 93. In a letter to his wife Mary dated April 2, 1895, Conan Doyle wrote: “I have done the fifth Brigadier, and I conceived (during my illness) the sixth so that they are practically all done, for which I cannot be sufficiently thankful. I should not be at all surprised to see the Brigadier become quite a popular character – not so much so as Holmes, but among a more discriminating public.” On March 9, 1896, following the publication of The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, Conan Doyle wrote to Mary to report that “The reviews of “Brigadier” have been most satisfactory. . . . It is pleasant to see so many people fond of him – for I was a bit fond of him myself.” – Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower & Charles Foley. (N. Y.: Penguin Press, 2007), pp. 351, 369.
In 1905, Conan Doyle wrote a play based on the Brigadier Gerard stories entitled Brigadier Gerard: A Romantic Comedy in Four Acts which had two brief runs in London in 1906, from March until May at the Imperial Theatre, then from May until June at the Lyric Theatre, followed by a run of several weeks at the Savoy Theatre in New York in November of the same year. The play remains unpublished. A number of films have been based on the stories, including the silent film Brigadier Gerard directed by Bert Haldane and starring Lewis Waller in 1915, and The Adventures of Gerard directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring Peter McEnery in 1970. In 2008, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky began developing a feature film comedy based on the stories starring Steve Carrell as Gerard and Ricky Gervais as Napoleon.
George McDonald Fraser acknowledged Brigadier Gerard as a major inspiration for his Flashman series, also set during the Napoleonic Wars.”These two volumes [The Exploits and The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard] show Conan Doyle the short story writer at his best. No one ever paced a tale more expertly, or had a better sense of timing. He was a master of suspense and the unexpected, mingling cliff-hanging action and swordplay with romance, homely philosophy, and humor, this last coming from Gerard’s gift of eccentric narrative and the author’s expertly handled contrast between his hero’s blandly egotistic view of events and what is actually happening. . . . it takes an uncommon talent, and a good heart, to create as timeless a character as his dashing, gallant little brigadier, who seems to embody all that is brightest in the human spirit.” – from Fraser’s Introduction to Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard (N. Y.: New York Review Books, 2001).
The present collection represents five of the eight short stories that appeared in The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard and an extraordinary opportunity to acquire a significant portion of one of Conan Doyle’s most impressive creations. The manuscript of “The Medal of Brigadier Gerard” is in fine condition; the binding lightly rubbed; the other manuscripts, which have been assembled using revisions written on separate pieces of paper, usually of a smaller size, or cut down to a smaller size, and inserted or taped to the original drafts, are in very good condition, with a few tears and stains; the front hinge of the binding is cracked, and the top panel of the spine is detached (but retained).
Provenance: By descent from Herbert F. Gunnison.