Posts Tagged → first edition

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

by bell hooks

First Edition | Simon and Schuster | 1952

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Known for her writing on race, feminism, and class relations, bell hooks is currently seeing a renaissance of her work in the cultural zeitgeist, specifically around her book Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002). 

Part of a trilogy on the subject of women and love, Communion owes its origins to her early works, such as Sisters of the Yam. Exploring trauma, healing, truth, work, beauty, addiction, grief, and passion, hooks navigates the experience of being a Black woman in America and offers strategies for empowerment to her readers. Her eighth published book, It is a foundational text on love, community, and intersectionality. 

These themes can particularly be seen in her choice of pen name. Originally born Gloria Jean Watkins, her pseudonym comes from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks as a way of honoring the women in her family that came before her. The lowercase spelling, on the other hand, is a deliberate attempt to decenter herself from her writing, letting it stand on its own merit. 

Notably, this does not mean she does not write about her personal life. Sisters of the Yam draws deeply from hooks’ personal life, using it as a foundation to speak to universal truths that all women, especially Black women, face in the world. She posits that our lives are much more similar than they are different, but that those differences are still key. And through that understanding, we begin to heal. 

Fatal Interview: Sonnets

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

SIGNED | First Edition | Harper and Brothers Publishers | 1931

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Edna St Vincent Millay, who went by Vincent throughout her life, was a fascinating woman living right at the turn of the nineteenth century. Raised, along with her two sisters, by her single mother, Vincent was encouraged to be self-aware, highly creative, and ambitious. 

Her writing career started at a young age, winning a poetry prize at 14 and published by 15. By 21 she was attending Vassar College on a full scholarship. School was difficult for Millay, who was used to a high degree of independence that the institution didn’t offer. She was a juxtaposition of the jazz age woman–often smoking, gambling, drinking, and flirting with both men and women; while also maintaining a strict, self-imposed writing schedule that won her both high honors in the literary circles and kept her mother and sisters out of poverty. 

After her graduation, Vincent moved to Greenwich Village–the beating heart of the bohemian jazz age. Often starring in theater productions and reading tours, Vincent was both widely popular and highly controversial. Her poetry over the years dealt with such taboo themes as feminism, divorce, war, and poverty. And yet, her vivacity and intelligence inevitably won people over. 

In 1923, at the age of 31, Vincent won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.” Though the Pulitzer Prizes had been around for six years, this was only the second year the Poetry Award had been established. 

During the next few years Vincent married Eugen Jan Boissevain and moved into her own home, Steepletop, near Austerlitz, New York. Once a blueberry farm, it became Vincent’s writing and entertaining retreat. After her death, her sister, Norma helped establish Steepletop as a writer’s colony, attended by such famous poets as Mary Oliver. After Norma’s passing, a land sale helped preserve Steepletop as a museum. 

Fatal Interview is Vincent’s seventh book of poetry. Published in 1931 when Vincent was 39 years old, the sonnets mourn a failed love affair. Though devotedly married and semi-retired at Steepletop, Vincent still led a very unconventional and bohemian life that included a number of lovers, a possible gambling problem, and a drug addiction from a traumatic car crash years before. 

Reading Vincent’s poetry is to take a peek into that life and feel, for just a moment, like you too are a young jazz age debutante, a vibrant performer, a social activist, an eclectic poet all rolled into one. 

You’re in Love, Charlie Brown

by Charles M. Schultz

First Edition | The World Publishing Company | 1968

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This book is the “novelization” of the prime-time animated TV special, “You’re in Love, Charlie Brown” that aired on June 16th, 1967. Based on the Peanuts comic strip that ran from 1950-2000 by Charles M. Schultz. 

Our beloved anti-hero Charlie Brown is having an existential crisis over his crush on “the pretty little red-haired girl.” He wants to meet her, be friends, maybe have lunch together. But as he fumbles through the last couple days of school, his mind on impressing his classmate, we (as the audience) quickly see that Charlie is at no loss for friends. 

Linus walks to school with Charlie as well as sits with him at lunch, though Charlie’s too busy fretting to notice. Peppermint Patty calls him up (her first appearance in the franchise) to invite him to play baseball over the summer. She even affectionately calls him “Chuck” and offers to help him try and meet the Little Red-Haired Girl. 

Lucy is the most antagonistic, teasing him about his crush, but that has more to do with her own melodramatic, soap-opera adjacent fantasies of a life with Schroeder, than anything to do with Charlie himself. And it is also the kind of underlyingly fond 8-year-old teasing that comes from being close friends and neighbors. 

The point is that Charlie does have a group of friends. He is not alone. The Little Red-Haired Girl, though obviously a real person in the Charlie Brown universe, is never shown in-person or referred to by her given name. And that’s because she’s actually a metaphor. A projection of Charlie’s own insecurities about his place in his community and how he will fit, now that summer is arriving and school will be out. 

But as we have already seen, that problem is solved by Peppermint Patty’s arrival and invitation to play baseball. And he already had his sister Sally, his dog Snoopy, and his best friend Linus–they would not have disappeared over the summer break.

What Charlie really needed to find was his own confidence. So when a note signed “The Little Red-Haired Girl” mysteriously finds its way into his hand as the final busses depart the schoolyard, Charlie is elated. He was noticed! Even if, I suspect, it was by Linus or Lucy or Peppermint Patty slipping him the note. It doesn’t matter, the result is the same, Charlie runs home feeling on top of the world. And we do too, because *we* love you, Charlie Brown.

If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

First Edition | The Dial Press | 1974

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James Baldwin’s fifth novel is, in many ways, emblematic of his work. A love story set amidst the racial injustices of midcentury America, If Beale Street Could Talk irrevocably intertwines suffering and passion, family and society, and how our human bonds shape our lives. 

This is the main thesis of much of Baldwin’s oeuvre. The main characters, Tish and Fonny, are engaged, pregnant, and trying their best to get by. But life, in the form of a false criminal accusation, derails their plans. Social and economic prejudices shape the accusation leading to Fonny’s arrest. 

Tish, the narrator (and Baldwin’s only female protagonist), struggles not only with Fonny’s arrest and all that entails, but with her pre-marital pregnancy. Religion, family, and social expectations both weaken and strengthen her familial bonds with both her and Fonny’s parents. Tish’s mother and Fonny’s father both go on journeys to try and save their children. In the end, Fonny is released from prison and Tish has their child, but the ending is neither a happy nor a sad one. Instead it is ambivalent and unsettled–a mirror of the world they live in. 

And as much as it is a romantic love story, If Beale Street Could Talk is also a familial love story. Extreme sacrifices are made for the love of Tish and Fonny. Their parents, with their own baggage and beliefs, clearly love their children and do their best to help them. The unity between all of them–symbolized by Tish and Fonny’s unborn child–tethers our characters together and ultimately allows them to get through their individual and combined struggles. 

In this way it is a very traditional love story. Its unconventionality lies in the social, economic, and racial commentary Baldwin so deftly weaves around his storytelling. Love, and life, cannot be separated from these outside sources. And it is this love that ultimately saves our characters from the psychological terrors of life, when others do not, or cannot, survive. Not exactly a high note to end on, but it is one of hope–that all the love in our own life, will also see us through.

A Christmas Book: An Anthology for Moderns

by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and G. C. Heseltine

First Edition | J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. | 1928

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Born Llewellyn Bevan Wyndham Lewis (1891-1969) but better known as Dominic, Wyndham Lewis originally intended to pursue a legal career. But WWI had other ideas. After his service with the Welch Regiment, Wyndham-Lewis turned instead to journalism, pursuing a career at the Daily Express. His work at the newspaper was primarily as a humorist. And under the pen name Beachcomber he wrote the “By the Way” column–which launched his literary career. Beachcomber was a pen name adopted from the column’s previous contributor and later passed on to his own successor, J. B. Morton.  

During the following years Wyndham-Lewis converted to Catholicism (changing his first name to Dominic, which all of his successive work is known by), took up the biography of French nobles, and produced a number of historical nonfiction. 

But Wyndham-Lewis is perhaps best known for being an editor and satirist. In fact, his comic sensibilities are on full display in The Stuffed Owl, an anthology of “bad verse” by well-known poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, William Wordsworth, and many others. 

It is this type of satirical work that is on full display in A Christmas Book: An Anthology for Moderns. In it, Wyndham Lewis maligns the modern world. It’s all a very tongue-in-cheek “kids these days” while also very seriously reminding his readers that not every poem, song, ballad, and recipe made it to the modern celebration of the holiday. The holiday traditions that we know and love–the Christmas stories that everyone knows and that get reprinted hundreds of times every year–are just the lucky few that were popular enough to make it through.

In fact, the preface very clearly states that “The following essentials to any Christmas Anthology will be found nowhere in this Anthology: extracts from Dickens, Pepys (with one exception), and (with one exception) Washington Irving, and reference (with one exception) to Father Christmas; also fake-Gothic carols (including Good King Wenceslas), robins, property Yule-logs, synthetic snow, redfaced jovial Squires, wigs by Clarkson, Ye Olde Englysshe Yuletyde Cheere (18—), and all manifestations of the coloured Christmas Supplement.”

And like any good satirist, Wyndham Lewis pretends to be a scrooge about who and what is included in his anthology…but also allows one or two exceptions. Because they’re classics and nostalgic and what’s the holiday season without a bit of fun?

This is a great book for any ultra-modern readers who have an interest in how the celebration of Christmas has evolved over the years–or who’d just like to spend a very merry afternoon reading holiday stories that you’ve likely never heard before. So pull up a chair, grab a hot beverage, and start your own modern reading tradition this Christmas. 

Feasts for All Seasons

by Roy Andries de Groot

SIGNED by illustrator! | First Edition | Alfred A. Knopf | 1966

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It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the US and what better way to celebrate than with a really huge meal cooked for your family and friends! And what better way to do that than with Roy Andries de Groot’s seasonally-focused cookbook, A Feast for All Seasons. 

Broken into four gastronomic seasons: The Spring, Summer Harvest, Fall Holiday Season, and Winter Dog Days, this book includes numerous recipes built around the peak season for each ingredient and celebrating a wide variety of holidays stemming from many diverse cultures.

But for the Fall Holiday Season, which includes the months of October, November, and December, de Groot focuses mainly on the preparation of meals for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Lists of seasonal foods–wild game, fish, root vegetables, squashes, nuts, and fruits–are included alongside a lengthy discussion of hot beverages, a quick aside on kumquats, and a meditation on honey. 

Holidays included in the season: 

  • October 10th – the Double Ten holiday, celebrating the China’s freedom from the Manchu Dynasty in 1910
  • October 29th – The Foundation of the Republic Day, celebrated in Turkey
  • October 31st – Halloween!
  • November 1st – The Independence Day of Algeria
  • Late November – Thanksgiving
  • November 30th – St Andrew’s Day, a Scottish holiday
  • December 13th – St Lucia’s Day, celebrated in Sweden
  • December 24th – Christmas Eve
  • December 31st – New Year’s Eve celebrated in German style

And yet, despite the traditional nature of all holiday celebrations, de Groot proclaims that “We refuse to be hidebound traditionalists about our Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts” and suggests suckling pig, venison, or turkey for either meal. He urges you to be creative, to break away from the same old standard fare and to try the vast gastromic delights of autumn.

Now onto the feast! The remaining 13 pages of the chapter are recipes for cream of pumpkin soup, roast turkey with fruit and chestnut stuffing, apples molded in a scarlet overcoat, yams with apricots and sunflower seeds, Brillat-Savarin’s spinach, and a demitasse selection of drinks. When to start preparation of each dish, ideas for finger-foods and relishes, best ways to serve each item, and last minute garnishes are all included in de Groots recipes. 

But perhaps the most useful information de Groot includes in all his timetables on when and how to prepare each portion of each dish, is actually included in the Acknowledgements at the front of the cookbook, “This book began as an idea within our family. It became the shared project of many of our friends.” That is the heart of any feast–and it is reflected in the language used throughout the book. “We” cooked the food. De Groot, his family and friends, you the reader, your family and friends, and everyone else who ever tested out one of these recipes. Feasts are communal and–over a lovingly prepared meal–we give thanks that we’re all together. Which when it’s all boiled down, is the heart of all holidays. 

P.S. – This particular edition of Feasts for All Seasons is inscribed by the illustrator, Tom Funk “My Best Wishes at Christmas” and dated 1966. And since the recipient is unknown, we can imagine that he’s reaching through time and wishing us all a happy holiday season.

The Compleat Practical Joker

by H. Allen Smith and illustrated by Charles Addams

First Edition | Double Day & Company, Inc. | 1953

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This post is only incidentally about the book The Compleat Practical Joker or its author, H. Allen Smith. Rather it’s about Charles Addams (1912-1988), who illustrated the dustjacket. 

Addams, as you may well know, was a cartoonist most famous for his Addams Family series about a spooky gothic family. But what isn’t as well known is that the members of the Addams Family–Gomez, Morticia, Pugsley, Wednesday, Grandmama, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Thing, and Cousin Itt–all existed as separate characters long before The Addams Family television show aired in 1964. 

In fact, the first published Addams Family cartoon was in The New Yorker in 1938. It’s a one-panel gag that features a then-unnamed Morticia and a proto-Lurch–who looks more like Boris Karloff than Frankenstein’s monster. Morticia is the earliest of the Addams Family characters to be introduced, later followed by Gomez, the children, and Fester. In 1946, we see these core members gathered together, possibly for the first time, celebrating the holidays by scalding Christmas carolers with boiling oil. 

Which is why it’s not very unusual to see Uncle Fester peeking around the corner of The Compleat Practical Joker’s (1958) dustjacket, even though it is almost a decade before the airing of the television show. Addams often reused his favorite characters and Fester, being the most like Charles Addams himself, is the perfect character to illustrate a book on practical jokes. After all, Addams was a satirist, cartoonist, and humorist. Fester lights up the topsy-turvy room. 

The Addams Family television show only lasted two seasons, but Charles’ unique gothic sensibility has stood the test of time–with the 90s movies, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, the modern Netflix series, and even a musical–helping to ensure that Charles Addams’ art and legacy haunts us to this day. 

They’re creepy and they’re kooky
Mysterious and spooky
They’re all together ooky
The Addams family

“The Addams Family Theme”
by Andrew Gold

Star Trek: Logs One–Ten

by Alan Dean Foster

SIGNED | First Editions | Ballantine and Del Rey | 1974-1978

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The Star Trek: Log books are the complete novelization of all 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series (colloquially referred to as TAS by fans). It is the first English-language TV series to be completely adapted into literary form. All ten books are signed by Alan Dean Foster. 

The Logs have a really unusual publishing history. Which, as both a book nerd and a Trekkie, I find really interesting. Published from 1974-1978, the first six paperbacks each contain three novella-length episode adaptations, which were written as linked stories. The final four books were adaptations of individual episodes that contained original components and extended plots. So the end result is a series that contains a mix of straightforward recaps and original storytelling. 

To make things even more interesting, the original publisher, Ballantine Books, began the print run using Filmation cells from the show as the cover artwork. With white wraps and colorful text, the animation stills clearly delineated the books as TAS stories. However, sometime in 1976, a decision was made to change the book design. So Logs Nine and Ten feature starship artwork by Stanislaw Fernandes, who had recently moved from Corgi Books the UK–where, as Art Director, he mostly likely signed off on the designs for the UK editions of Logs One through Five (the deal to reprint Logs Six through Ten fell through, so the UK editions aren’t a complete set). 

To add a further complication to matters, Ballantine shifted the Star Trek Logs to their newly created imprint, Del Rey, in 1977. So the colophon and trim size varies slightly in Log Ten, compared to the previous volumes. 

In the present day realm of book collecting, this results in a very unique outcome–you cannot get a full matching set of first edition Logs. They just don’t exist. A full matching set of Fernandes cover designs are available. Later Del Rey editions were redesigned with his starship artwork on brightly colored, solid backgrounds, resulting in a psuedo-rainbow effect when the volumes are lined up on a shelf. And though the background colors have occasionally changed over the years, (somewhat marring the flow from one color to another) the starship designs have not. They remain a matching set. 

And maybe you’re asking yourself. Why is any of this important? What’s so interesting about first edition book designs that don’t match?

And I suppose the answer is it’s a really good story. And kinda familiar–the Logs are the first books of their kind to be a complete television novelization, but it’s a bit hodge-podge in makeup and the covers don’t quite match. And yet, like a certain crew, they belong together. So as one enterprising first officer might say, “Fascinating, Captain.” 

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

OR The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering

by W. Y. Evans-Wentz

First Edition | Oxford University Press | 1927

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This Oxford University edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, though published less than a century ago, has a publication history that spans a millennium. The book’s original content is credited to Padma Sambhava, a Buddhist teacher, mystic, and prophet, who dictated the text to the Tibetan princess Yeshe Tsogyal in the 8th century. These writings that would become The Book of the Dead were called Bardo Thodol in Tibetan, and discussed Buddhist ideas of the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, as well as states of existence between death and rebirth called bardos. If this story is true, Bardo Thodol pre-dates even the writing of Beowulf.

As the story goes, Padma Sambhava prophesied that the book was not right for the current time, but would be discovered some 500 years later when it was most needed by Tibet and the wider world. Indeed, in the midst of the bubonic plague’s devastation of the 1300s, a boy named Karma Lingpa came across the place where Yeshe Tsogyal had hidden the text. He disseminated Bardo Thodol across Tibet and other Buddhist nations, and it quickly became a staple text in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

Bardo Thodol‘s English title comes from Walter Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist, writer, and spiritualist known for his work bringing the philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism to prominence in the western world. While Evans-Wentz’s name graces the cover of the first English translation (which you see here), published by Oxford University in 1927, his involvement with The Tibetan Book of the Dead are controversial for many reasons. For one, Evans-Wentz himself did not do the actual translation work, which was performed by Kazi Dawa Samdup. While Bardo Thodol literally translates to “Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State,” Evans-Wentz chose to make reference to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which was popular among spiritualists — one of many ways in which he imposed his own views and spiritualist philosophy on the text. This first translation, as a result, strays so far from Padma Sambhava’s original ideas that it no longer resembles true tenets of Tibetan Buddhism.

Despite — or maybe because of — Evans-Wentz’s departures, The Tibetan Book of the Dead developed a following and significance of its own. The book’s spiritual notions lent themselves well to the American counterculture movement of the 1960s, which popularized the use of psychedelics to achieve states of consciousness that ascended earthly existence, much like the bardos of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1964, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book that linked Evans-Wentz’s version of Buddhist principles to the use of psychedelics to achieve ego death, among other subjects.

Later translations of Bardo Thodol have stayed truer to the original text, adding another layer of significance and uniqueness to this first edition copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is both a work of literature and an artifact of history, with seeds of influence that have proliferated and will continue to proliferate in spiritual, philosophical, and cultural corners of thought in years to come. In all its years of complex publication history, this book has made its way to the Dawn Treader’s shelves — come by the store to see for yourself!

The Trail of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

First Edition, First Printing | Arkham House | 1962

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In 1962 Arkham House published The Trail of Cthulhu, which collected five of August Derleth’s interconnected stories into one volume for the first time. This book, its author, and its publisher are all historically significant in the genre of “weird” fiction — a difficult-to-define style of speculative writing that blends elements of horror, macabre fantasy, the supernatural, and a general suspension of the laws of nature. Think Edgar Allan Poe, Stranger Things, or H. P. Lovecraft, who is credited with popularizing the term. August Derleth, who did much to develop the genre, was a correspondent and disciple of Lovecraft; theirs was a relationship that significantly shaped the trajectory of Derleth’s life’s work.

Lovecraft’s influence is perhaps most evident in those of August Derleth’s books that feature Cthulhu, a cosmic deity that resembles part green octopus, part dragon, and part human, whom Lovecraft wrote into existence in 1928. The stories in The Trail of Cthulhu — all previously published in Weird Tales — take place in Arkham, Massachusetts, a fictional town central to Lovecraft’s writing, where one may encounter the Great Old Ones. Several writers in Lovecraft’s circle adopted Cthulhu and the rules of Arkham’s sur-reality into their own works, including Derleth, who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe this shared fictional universe. In literary dissections of this mythopoeia, Derleth’s interpretation of the world differs from Lovecraft’s — while Lovecraft’s Mythos serves to convey the meaninglessness of human supremacy, Derleth’s represents a struggle between good and evil with elements of hope for humanity.

Differences aside, the Cthulhu Mythos — and Lovecraft himself — would live in relative anonymity today if not for Derleth. In 1937, Derleth and Donald Wandrei established Arkham House explicitly for the sake of posthumously publishing Lovecraft’s writing, which hadn’t been popular during his lifetime. The publishing house went on to become a stalwart in the weird fiction landscape for the next 70 years, continuing to Lovecraft’s work alongside names such as Robert E. Howard, H. Russell Wakefield, and August Derleth himself.

Arkham House’s first printing of Derleth’s The Trail of Cthulhu produced 2470 copies. One of these has made its way, over the years, to the shelves of the Dawn Treader, where it sits next to a first edition of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, published by Arkham House in 1964. Come by the store to find these and many other weird and wonderful fictions!