Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Mini-Catalogue Tuesday???

I have just finished putting together a little catalogue of ten items, mostly new acquisitions, and all new offerings, ranging from a 1685 English translation of Montaigne's Essays to a signed copy of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. I would say there is something for everyone here, but there's only ten things, after all.
Wharton's Book of the Homeless

The gem of the lot, given recent events, is the 1916 The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton. Organized as a kind of fund raising efforts to help families and children--displaced homeless refugees--of the Great War, this book reminds me powerfully that the story of the refugee might be just as much the story of the twentieth (and no twenty-first) century, as W E B DuBois's color line.

Filled with contributions from authors like Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, W B Yeats and Wharton herself, as well as artwork from Rodin, Sargent, Monet and others, the book was published in a trade edition and in two limited large-paper editions. My copy is one of 175 total of those two limited editions.

It is a bit depressing to find a 99-year-old book with such topical timeliness, but that's history, I guess.

Interested browsers should be able to download the catalogue from this link. Or you can always email me.

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