Bauman Rare Books – Our March Catalogue: Banned, Burned & Censored Books

Monumental 1802 Boydell Illustrated Shakespeare

13. SHAKESPEARE, William – The Dramatic Works. London, 1802. Nine volumes. Large thick folio (13½ by 17 inches), contemporary full plum straight-grain morocco gilt. $17,500

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A Bauman Rare Books localizada em  New York | 535 Madison Ave (Between 54th and 55th Streets) | (212) 751-0011 | Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. | Las Vegas | Grand Canal Shoppes – The Venetian | The Palazzo | (702) 948-1617 Open Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to Midnight | Philadelphia | 1608 Walnut Street | (215) 546-6466 |Open by Appointment Only, fez sair o seu catálogo de Março sob o tema Banned, Burned & Censored Books, é deste mesmo catálogo que vos quero dar algumas notícias.

“From landmarks of counterculture to revolutionary religious texts, these books were banned for challenging governments and transforming societies with bold new ideas.”

E com maior rigor na Introdução do Catálogo afirma-se:

“T hese are the books that have changed societies and toppled governments. We’re proud to offer you the opportunity to add the landmarks of counterculture to your collection—The Catcher in the Rye, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; or to preserve a Sendak book many people would prefer pulled from the shelves; or to own a copy of the first book to allow Soviets a glimpse inside the gulags. Of course we also offer a fine representative selection of great and controversial works. Through centuries of social and artistic protest, from the 1582 first Roman Catholic New Testament, in English, through the works of Jonathan Swift, Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, and Mark Twain. Collecting banned books is about protecting important ideas; we believe every great collection contains some—often many—banned books. H.L. Menken said, “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is about to think things out.” Being a little dangerous can be a good thing.”

Catalogo

Vamos então folhear o catálogo e ver algumas das suas obras:

 “STORIES OF FOLK GONE BEFORE AND ADMONITORY INSTANCES OF THE MEN OF YORE”: ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF BURTON’S ARABIAN NIGHTS WITH 71 RICH PLATES, VERY HANDSOMELY BOUND, HOUSED IN THE ORIGINAL WOOD-GILT HINGED BOX

6. BURTON, Richard F. – The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. London: H.S. Nichols, 1897. Twelve volumes. Royal octavo, publisher's three-quarter burgundy morocco gilt, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, uncut and partly unopened. Housed in the original wooden box with brass hinges and spring lock and Arabic title in gilt on lid.

$9,000

Illustrated “Library Edition” of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s lively (and often daring) translation of The Arabian Nights—the enduring, irresistible folk tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba and many more heroes and heroines of adventure, romance, mystery and magic—with 71 lush and lovely plates after the iconic paintings of Albert Letchford, handsomely bound in morocco-gilt using Arabic designs. This among the earliest complete editions of Burton’s famed translation. Housed in the original wooden box with hinged lid, upon which the title in Arabic is gilt-stamped: Alf Laylah wa Laylah, “Thousand Nights and a Night.”

The Alf Layla wa-Layla ("One Thousand Nights and a Night") have enchanted readers for centuries with shimmering visions of "a land of fable environment whose deserts and oases, bazaars and slums, jeweled caverns and minaret-topped edifices are immediately recognizable" (Clute & Grant, 51).

Esteemed explorer and scholar Burton translated and annotated the Arabian Nights, intending to create "a legacy to his countrymen, of whose imperial mission he was ever mindful, and to perpetuate the fruit of his own oriental experiences" (DNB). The Nichols editions—one in 1894, not illustrated, and this 1897 edition with Letchford's plates—were the first complete editions of Burton's translation after the rare, 16-volume first edition of 1885. 

These complete editions were preceded only by an expurgated edition issued by Burton's wife shortly after his death. Each volume with half title. With facsimiles of the 1885 edition's title pages bound in. See Penzer, 113, 117-123.

A beautiful set in fine condition, most desirable in its original wooden box.

1582 FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST ROMAN CATHOLIC NEW TESTAMENT IN ENGLISH, NOTED THEOLOGIAN JOHN EADIE'S PERSONAL COPY

23. BIBLE. The New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated Faithfully Into English, out of the authentical Latin… With Arguments of bookes and chapters, Annotations, and other necessarie helpes… for cleering the Controversies in religion, of these daies… Rhemes: John Fogny, 1582. Small quarto, late 19th-century full brown morocco, elaborately blind-tooled spine, raised bands, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt; pp. [30] 745 [27].

$29,000

Very scarce first edition of the important Rheims New Testament, the first Roman Catholic version in English, translated from the Vulgate. The copy of noted biblical scholar and pastor John Eadie.

Like the Geneva Bible, the Rheims New Testament was "produced by religious refugees who carried their faith and work abroad. Since the English Protestants used their vernacular translations, not only as the foundation of their own faith but as siege artillery in the assault on Rome, a Catholic translation became more and more necessary in order that the faithful could answer, text for text, against the 'intolerable ignorance and importunity of the heretics of this time.' The chief translator was Gregory Martin… Technical words were transliterated rather than translated. Thus many new words came to birth… Not only was [Martin] steeped in the Vulgate, he was, every day, involved in the immortal liturgical Latin of his church. The resulting Latinisms added a majesty to his English prose, and many a dignified or felicitous phrase was silently lifted by the editors of the King James's Version, and thus passed into the language" (Great Books and Book Collectors 108). While Martin was responsible for the translation, the controversial textual annotations in defense of Catholic doctrine are attributed to Richard Bristow, one of the supervisors of the project; most copies of this edition were purportedly suppressed and destroyed because of these notes (some of which were removed from later editions). 

The New Testament was issued separately and first, in the hope that its successful sale would finance prompt production of the Old Testament; the two-volume Old Testament did not, however, appear until 1609-10. With ornamental woodcut title border, historiated initials, and head- and tailpieces. Without leaf Qqqqi only (pages 673-4, the final leaf of 2 Peter). The Bible 100 Landmarks 65. The Bible in the Lilly Library 39. Dore, 291-98. Herbert 177. Darlow & Moule 134. Pierpont Morgan Library, The Bible 112. Rumball-Petre, 15. Rylands, 95. STC 2884. 

Armorial bookplate of Scottish Presbyterian biblical scholar and pastor (and noted theological book collector) John Eadie, with Latin motto "Crux mihi grata quies" ("The Cross is to me welcome rest"). Eadie—who at one time could recite all of Paradise Lost from memory—was greatly interested in "the movement for a revision of the English New Testament [and] was one of the original members of the New Testament revision company" (DNB). An early owner inscription on title page notes the confirmation of Anna Rita Hill in 1713; contemporary signatures of Thomas Hill on page 381 and Mary Hill on page [748]. From the Bible collection of Bernard Engel, Esq. Occasional contemporary marginalia (presumably in Eadie's hand).

Text and binding fine. An exceptional copy of an important and rare printing, with a noteworthy provenance. Extremely scarce.

“THE UNFOLDING OF A MIND OF GENIUS IN DIALOGUE WITH ITSELF”: RARE 1613 SECOND EDITION IN ENGLISH OF MONTAIGNE’S ESSAYES

56. MONTAIGNE –  Essayes Written In French… Done Into English, according to the last French edition, by John Florio. London: Melch, Bradwood for Edward Blount and William Barret, 1613. Folio (8 by 11-1/2 inches), contemporary full brown calf rebacked and recornered, gilt ornamental lozenges, raised bands, red morocco spine label.

$16,000

Second edition in English of Montaigne’s seminal masterpiece, with the important Elizabethan translation of John Florio used by Shakespeare as a source for The Tempest (circa 1611), a work profoundly influenced by Lucretius, who is quoted almost a hundred times in the work, a splendid folio volume in contemporary calf boards.

"Montaigne startles the common reader at each fresh encounter, if only because he is unlike any preconception we bring to him… His scope and capaciousness sometimes approach Shakespearean dimensions… Montaigne's [is]… the first personality ever put forward by a writer as the matter of his work. Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer are indirect descendants of Montaigne, even as Emerson and Nietzsche are his direct progeny… He represents—not everyman… but very nearly every man who has the desire, ability, and opportunity to think and to read" (Bloom, Western Canon, 147-151). "Montaigne devised the essay form in which to express his personal convictions and private meditations, a form in which he can hardly be said to have been anticipated… He finds a place in the present canon, however, chiefly for his consummate representation of the enlightened skepticism of the 16th century, to which Bacon, Descartes and Newton were to provide the answers in the next" (PMM 95). Here is "the unfolding of a mind of genius in dialogue with itself and with the world" (Hollier, 250). "It is generally accepted that Shakespeare used Florio's translation when writing the passage on the natural commonwealth in his Tempest" (Pforzheimer 378).

The influence on Montaigne of the Roman poet and philosopher is particularly strong and obvious. The Essays contain almost 100 direct quotations from Lucretius' Epicurian masterpiece De rerum natura; in the Essay "On Books," Montaigne lists Lucretius with Virgil, Horace and Catullus as the top poets. As the critic Stephen Greenblatt has commented, "beyond any particular passage, there is a profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne. Montaigne shared Lucretius' contempt for a morality enforced by nightmares of the afterlife; he clung to the importance of his own senses and the evidence of the material world; he intensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence against the flesh; he treasured inward freedom and contentment. In grappling with the fear of death, in particular, he was influenced by Lucretian materialism. He once saw a man die, he recalled, who complained bitterly in his last moments that destiny was preventing him from finishing the book he was writing. The absurdity of the regret, in Montaigne's view, is best conveyed by lines from Lucretius: 'But this they fail to add: that after you expire / Not one of all these things will fill you with desire.' As for himself, Montaigne wrote, 'I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden'" (Stephen Greenblatt, "The Answer Man," in The New Yorker, August 8, 2011). Initially published in French in 1580, Montaigne's Essayes were first published in English in 1603, with this translation. Frontispiece portrait of Florio by William Hole bound between Contents and first text leaf; containing general title page, separate title pages for the second and third books. With rear blank leaf, elaborate ornamental woodcut-engraved initials, headpieces throughout. Occasional mispagination as issued without loss of text. STC 18042. Lowndes, 1588. ESTC S111840. See Langland to Wither 102. Title page with contemporary owner signature dated 1614.

Interior quite fresh with only minor expert archival repair to edges of title page and and a few leaves not affecting text, lightest scattered foxing, faint rubbing to boards. A very handsome near-fine copy.

A GREAT MODERN RARITY: STUNNING FIRST ISSUE, REVIEW COPY OF SALINGER'S CLASSIC, WITH AN EXTRAORDINARY UNRECORDED BROADSIDE IN WHICH SALINGER REVEALS PERSONAL FEELINGS ABOUT HIS DISAPPOINTMENT THAT CHILDREN WILL NOT READ IT

74. SALINGER, J.D. –  The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom chemise and half morocco slipcase.

$39,500

First edition of Salinger’s first book, in first-issue dust jacket with photograph of Salinger on the back panel. With review slip and Salinger broadside laid in. A lovely copy.

"The Catcher in the Rye is undoubtedly a 20th-century classic" (Parker, 300). "This novel is a key-work of the nineteen-fifties in that the theme of youthful rebellion is first adumbrated in it, though the hero, Holden Caulfield, is more a gentle voice of protest, unprevailing in the noise, than a militant world-changer… The Catcher in the Rye was a symptom of a need, after a ghastly war and during a ghastly pseudo-peace, for the young to raise a voice of protest against the failures of the adult world" (Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels, 53-4). Laid in to this copy is a review slip headed "To the Literary Editor." 

In addition, this copy includes an unrecorded mimeographed broadside from the Little, Brown publicity department that reads: "In J. D. Salinger's own words: Born in New York City, in 1919. Have lived in and around New York most of my life. Educated in Manhattan public schools, a military academy in Pennsylvania, three colleges (no degree). A happy, tourist's year in Europe when I was eighteen and nineteen. I'd like to say who my favorite fiction writers are, but I don't see how I can do it without saying why they are. So I won't. I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach." A 1953 printing of this broadside (coinciding with publication of Nine Stories) has been recorded but does not include the last four sentences. The present copy is dated 1951, the year of publication.

Book fresh and fine; bright, unrestored dust jacket near-fine, with only lightest rubbing to spine head and minor toning. A clean and lovely copy, exceptionally desirable with rare broadside.

Muito mais haveria para mostrar, mas e eu optei por estas, como sempre a escolha é muito pessoal e criticável (embora tente sempre apresentar obras novas que nunca tenham por aqui passado visto que algumas delas já são do nosso conhecimento), a opção das mais importantes será sempre vossa, para o que será indispensável a consulta e leitura do respectivo catálogo, pelo que vos apresento os meus votos de uma boa consulta e leitura atenta deste mesmo catálogo.

Saudações bibliófilas e bom fim-de-semana.

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