DICKENS, Charles

London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854


8vo, pp. 352. Original green cloth, with blind-stamped design to both panels and lettered in gilt to spine. Yellow endpapers. ..... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, N.d. [1979]

Large 8vo, pp. 231. Original tan boards, lettered in gilt on spine.

First edition, INSCRIBED BY LORD ZUCKERMAN:... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

[AUDEN, W.H.]

New York: 1947

12mo, pp. 207-267. Stapled offprint.

First edition. Contains the text of Auden's Address on Henry James, given to coincide with the... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

SOMERVILLE, E. OE, and ROSS, Martin [pseud. MARTIN, Violet]

London: Methuen, V.d

Four 8vos. Original red boards, spine labels to each. Tissue guards to frontispieces.

Later editions, uniformly bound, ALL SIGNED BY EDITH... [please click on the image or book title for more details]

REID, Forrest

London: Edward Arnold, 1912

8vo, pp. 320. Original brown boards, lettered in black to front panel and spine. Lower edge uncut.

First edition.

A coming-of-age novel from an Ulster novelist at the beginning of the twentieth century is always going to invite comparisons with Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and comparisons are always made, but Reid is more than able to stand on his own two feet, not only because of the calibre of his writing, but because of the homosexual sensibility which permeates his work, never explicit but always there. This book is no exception. Reid was the bridge between the ornate crypticism of the Uranians and the beginning of the genre we now know as Gay Lit. He's both important and scarce -- which is why this less than beautiful copy is offered.

[pseud. ABBOTT, Edwin A.] SQUARE, A.

London: Seeley & Co., 1884

8vo, pp. 100. Original printed stiff paper wrappers. Leading edge uncut.

First edition.

One of literature's very few geometric Victorian social satires. Set in a two-dimensional world, A. Square visits the one-dimensional community of Lineland, where he is dismissed as a lunatic, and is then visited by a sphere from Spaceland. Convinced of the existence of a third dimension, Square starts to entertain the possibility of a fourth. And a fifth...

All of which made this text something of a sensation when Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, and Flatland was taken up as a text which foreshadowed major scientific findings. Since then, it has been cited by scientists as eminent as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, inspired films and books, and - of course - has been name-checked in an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

This, the first edition, is now very scarce.

[illus. THOMSON, Hugh] AUSTEN, Jane

London: Macmillan, 1896


8vo, pp. 437. Original red boards, lettered and with design in gilt to front panel and spine. Peacock patterned endpapers, all edges... [please click on the image or book title for more details]