Search Results: Titles starting with G from PY Rare Books

The first edition of one of Tolstoy's greatest and most popular short stories: a fine example, with the original wrappers.This copy bears the correct first issue points: the printed wrapper is priced 20 kopeks, and the text shows the printed censorship date of 17 February 1895.
Master and Man proved hugely popular, selling 15,000 copies within four days of its publication on 05 March 1895. To meet demand, Posrednik – Tolstoy's own publishing house – issued another edition on 09 March, priced at 3 kopeks.Master and Man reflect aspects of Tolstoy's own spiritual conversion, and is sometimes seen as a companion piece to Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
ProvenanceProchian (bookplate). Eden Martin, prominent American collector.
DescriptionTwelvemo (19.8 x 13.1 cm).Binding20thcentury red quarter morocco preserving the original wrappers and spine, these printed in red and black on cream paper.ConditionWrapper spine worn, light wear to the covers; occasional faint marginal soiling. ref: [1334]

First edition of this important collection of stories on Soviet labour camps, which Shalamov (1907-82), a poet and man of letters on the wrong side of the Soviet authorities, experienced repeatedly during the entire reign of Stalin, from 1929 to the early 50s.
Kolyma, where Shalamov spent most of his sentences, is a remote, sub-arctic region of north-eastern Siberia, where gold and platinum were discovered shortly before the Russian revolution. During the intensive industrialisation under Stalin, Kolyma became the most notorious region for the Gulag labour camps: a "pole of cold and cruelty" in the Gulag system as Solzhenitsyn described it. The celebrated poet Osip Mandelshtam died in 1938 on the way there, in a transit camp where Shalamov had been about a year earlier: the latter wrote Sherry Brandy, a short story of this tragic end, which was included in these Kolyma Tales.
A "collection of brief sketches, vignettes, and short stories, [Kolyma Tales] chronicles the degradation and dehumanization of… Read More

Rare first Russian edition of the fundamental work of great importance in the history of knowledge about the Earth.
Duga Meridiana is a detailed scientific report on the measurements of the Russian-Scandinavian meridian arc that allowed the scientists to define the exact size and shape of the Earth for the first time in the history of geodesy and astronomy. From 1816 to 1852, Wilhelm von Struve (1793-1864), one of the greatest 19th-century astronomers, established an elongated arc of geodetic survey points along the 25-degree meridian of East latitude, working in an international scientific cooperation. Originally, Struve and his colleagues conducted their measurements in order to map the territory of the Baltic Sea governorates; and only during this work Struve had an idea to measure a geodetic arc. The uniqueness of these measurements lies in their enormous length — a network of 265 triangulation points extended over a distance of 2820 km across 10 countries from Norway to Ukraine. These survey… Read More