Search Results: Titles starting with L from Honey & Wax Booksellers

Madrid: Saturnino Calleja Fernandez, 1900. First edition of this Spanish pocket guide to health and fitness, part of Saturnino Calleja Fernández's "Biblioteca Popular" series. The book offers a visual introduction to calisthenics, featuring dynamic illustrations in which dotted lines indicate movements of the limbs. The prescribed exercises require no equipment, and can be performed anywhere, at any time: "Nuestro sistema, por tanto, carece de aparejos, puesto que cada uno los lleva consigo, pudiendo ejercitarse sin fatiga á la hora que mejor parezca y en el sitio que más convenga." The colorful cover, featuring a muscular woman hoisting a dumbbell and boys swinging from a trapeze, is therefore misleading, but the graphic appeal of this little book is characteristic of the ephemeral educational works for which Saturnino Calleja Fernández was known: the Madrid publisher issued enormous runs of inexpensive, portable volumes to schools, playing a particularly important role in impoverished areas of… Read More

[San Francisco]: Imagerie Pellerin Épinal (An Intrinsics Production), 1964. Oversized psychedelic reproduction of a nineteenth-century Épinal construction print, the third in a series of six European architectural models produced in San Francisco in the 1960s. In 1796, Jean-Charles Pellerin founded a workshop in the French town of Épinal, turning out inexpensive, hand-colored woodcuts of Catholic saints, Napoleonic battles, and storybook characters. By the end of the nineteenth century, lithography had emerged as the preferred process for Épinal prints, and the range of subjects had greatly expanded. One popular genre was the construction print, providing generations of French children with do-it-yourself toy models of architectural landmarks. This eye-popping modern series of lithographs reproduces six historic Épinal construction prints on a poster-sized scale, the images reimagined in the fluorescent Day-Glo colorways of the mid-1960s. The complete series includes: 1) the New Town Hall in… Read More

Paris: Flammarion, Albums du Père Castor, 1946. First edition of this illustrated panorama of springtime, designed to be colored in watercolor or gouache. Featured images include a gardener pruning a tree, statues surrounded by spring blossoms, a farmer shearing a lamb, and laborers planting gardens and fields. Belvès was a career illustrator with Père Castor, the author of multiple books on art education, and a founder of Ateliers du Carrousel at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which runs public arts workshops for students of all ages to this day. Text in French. A near-fine copy, never colored. Single sheet, measuring 9.5 x 8.25 inches folded, unfolding to 9.5 x 33 inches. Pictorial panels printed in black on recto and in midnight blue on verso. Occasional stray smudge, light rubbing to folds.

Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé S.A., Éditeurs, 1916. Signed limited edition of a scarce title on ancient Egyptian textiles, numbered 77 of 125 copies, signed by the authors on the colophon, and published as part of the series Mémoires d'Archéologie et d'Ethnographie Comparées. (An additional twenty-five lettered copies were printed, not intended for sale.) The book's line drawings and tipped-in color plates, along with a sample sheet reproducing five woven silk bands of the period, display the breadth and skill of early Egyptian through Coptic weavers, highlighting their characteristic use of materials, colors, and patterns. The authors argue that the ancient Egyptians used tablets ("cartons," or cards) as their primary weaving device, a technology used in 1200-1500 BCE Europe and Scandinavia. This theory has been disproven: the Egyptians did, in fact, use looms. Text in French. BnF 1199; 5515. A very nearly fine copy of a key visual sourcebook of Egyptian textile design in its highly… Read More

(London): Macmillan, 1967. First edition of this early children's title by Newbery winner Paula Fox, the story of an anxious (and anxiously watched) young boy: "Everyone wanted to help Lewis. That's why he was thinking of running away." Lewis's life improves markedly when his parents leave town, and a free-spirited sitter allows him to roam after school. Publishers today would likely shy away from a story that encourages children to explore caves with men they befriend in the park, but in Fox's telling, Lewis's adventures have a dreamlike, almost magical quality. Edward Ardizzone's drawings perfectly capture the boy's experience of oppression and liberation. A near-fine copy. Single volume, measuring 8.5 x 5.5 inches: [6], 57, [1]. Original black cloth lettered in silver, original clipped orange pictorial dust jacket printed in black and white. Black and white illustrations throughout text. Lightest edgewear and sunning, small tape repair to jacket verso, ghost of bookseller label to front flap.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. First American edition, published three months after the British, of the fifth title in the Philip Marlowe detective series, signed by Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister follows the private eye to Hollywood, where Marlowe investigates a scandal involving a starlet, her gangster beau, and her missing brother. Chandler's disdain for the film business, informed by his own experiences as a screenwriter, is evident: "Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else." The Little Sister inspired the 1969 semi-noir film Marlowe, starring James Garner, who would go on to portray the equally sardonic detective Jim Rockford in the 1970s NBC television series The Rockford Files. Bruccoli A8.2.a. A scarce signed copy, in the original dust jacket designed by… Read More

Lans-en-Vercors, France: Locus Solus, 1961. Winter 1962 double issue of Locus Solus, dedicated to new poetry, signed by issue editor John Ashbery and five other contributors: Kenward Elmslie, LeRoi Jones (as Amiri Baraka), Kenneth Koch, Daniel Krakauer, and Larry Rivers. Other contributors include Diane Di Prima, Barbara Guest, Gerard Malanga, James Merrill, and Frank O'Hara. Published in France, but really produced below 14th Street in Manhattan, Locus Solus had an outsized impact on American poetry during its two-year run: "Each squat and plain issue looked like the serious literature of the French, a toned-down Gallimard volume perhaps" (Clay and Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side). A very good example, signed by six New York poets. Small octavo, measuring 7.25 x 4.75 inches: 294, [2]. Original blue printed wrappers. Signed by John Ashbery, Kenward Elmslie, LeRoi Jones (as Amiri Baraka, dated 1978), Kenneth Koch, Daniel Krakauer (inscribed "To Richard"), and Larry Rivers at their… Read More

New York: William Morrow and Company, 1969. First edition of Maeve Brennan's collected "Talk of the Town" pieces, originally published in The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s. Often credited as the inspiration for Truman Capote's Holly Golightly, Brennan was an observant girl-about-town who covered the midcentury Manhattan of neighborhood cafes, rented rooms, corner bars, and park benches: "Sixth Avenue possesses a quality that some people acquire, sometimes quite suddenly, which dooms it and them to be loved only at the moment when they are being looked at for the very last time." Brought back into print in the 1990s, after Brennan's death, these evanescent pieces describe everyday New Yorkers to pointed, comic, quietly devastating effect: "When she looks about her, it is not the strange or exotic ways of people that interest her, but the ordinary ways." A near-fine copy of a surprisingly scarce first edition. Single volume, measuring 8.25 x 5.5 inches: 237, [1]. Original monogrammed gold paper… Read More