Sigla Books

London, 1734. 2nd revised English-language edition. Folio (14.5" tall) in 12s. 5 vols, with some 4500 pages. Before Dr Johnson singlehandedly wrote his Dictionary of the English Language, Bayle made this compendium of historical and mythological figures. The first paragraph of the dedication gives an idea of how the project was framed.

End of the year endpapers.

London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1911]. No date (or even a copyright page), which indicates that it is indeed the first printing. Frontis, title page, and 11 plates by FD Bedford. For my dear sister, Lydia Jane, and so not for sale.

A scarce book, at least around here, especially now that a lot of titles published before, say, 1970 are turning up in fewer numbers. And some books are just worth having. One, for example, by somebody who devoted the better part of her scholarly life to elucidating a singularly odd work seldom read in the last century, and much less in this one. As it was a gift it isn't for sale.

QUICK .... SHARE .... UM .... ( Please? Now? WTF You waiting for ???????)

Graphics Press, 1986. It's all in the hashed ags.

The Opium-Eater, or Dick Wincey, as a friend knows him. Along with his addiction to laudanum, De Quincey had a lust for books. He continued paying rent on Dove Cottage to house his library, while he and his growing family lived elsewhere, only to move them back in to live among the stacks when his debts became unmanageable. On the run from creditors for the rest of his life, his many trunks of books remained mostly intact, including "about 8 separate works" by Giordano Bruno, which he refused to pawn. ***m

This is the first incarnation of Life and Letters, edited by Desmond MacCarthy. Dorothy Edwards' The Problem of Life was published here several months before she committed su***de.

In honour of Georgie's birthday, I thought I'd share this fairly scarce item published by Proa (1996).

T Neely, 1895. 1st edition with 3rd state binding. I'm partial to this one, with a suitably nefarious-looking image done by Chambers himself. The three colours were applied to the cloth without stamping, on the spine as well, where the scepter appears in blown-up form. Very small 8vo, with laid paper and untrimmed edges.

Reading Geulincx in the spring of 1936 helped Beckett shore up his thinking on human ignorance and powerlessness, epitomized by Murphy's rocking chair and Odysseus crawling eastward on the deck of a westward-tending ship. Well into the writing of Murphy, he finally tracked down a copy of a Latin edition in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Above is the first complete edition of the Ethics (with Beckett's notes) in English (Brill, 2006).

Apart from cofounding with John Lane The Bodley Head (the book-selling and publishing firm named after a bust of the eponym of The Bodleian Library, and the one responsible for publishing the scandalous Yellow Book) Elkin Mathews was the first to publish James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Lane and Mathews parted company in 1894, with EM reverting mainly to book-selling until his death in 1921. For mysterious reasons (to me, at least) the imprint was renamed Elkin Mathews & Marrot, continuing that way even after the business had been taken over by Percy Muir in 1930. The above is from the title page of Anna Seghers' Revolt of the Fishermen (1929).