Search Results: First Editions from Lightholder Books

An Academic Question by Barbara Pym. 1986 Dutton, first American edition, 182 pages. Pym was an English novelist, forever forgotten and rediscovered. In a retrospective in the New York Times: "However remote her themes may seem — a churn of parish politics and petty romances — beneath the gentle surfaces of her novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip. " Pym wrote thirteen novels, Academic was published posthumously.
Condition: Jacket in good condition with some wear, price clipped, book in good condition with owner name on end paper
"What jewels will you be wearing tonight, Mother?"

All Said and Done by Simone de Beauvoir. 1974 Putnam, first U.S. edition, 463 Pages. This is the last installment of de Beauvoir's autobiography, covering the last ten years of her life.

Condition: VG/VG. Some fading to jacket spine, shelf wear.

"My life: it is both intimately known and remote; it defines me and yet I stand outside it."

Angels by Denis Johnson. 1983 Knopf, first edition, 209 pages. Johnson was a novelist and poet who garnered acclaim for his short-story collection Jesus's Son and award-winning novel Tree of Smoke. According to New York Times, "[His] novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose." Angels was Johnson's first novel. Alice Hoffman wrote in her review for the New York Times: "'Angels' is a terrifying book, a mixture of poetry and obscenity. Some readers may be put off by its melodrama and nearly overwhelming sense of desperation. But whether the characters are conversing with a dark angel or ordering a platter of french fries, they are people who can't be ignored. Mr. Johnson has written a dazzling and savage first novel."
Condition: VG, some shelf wear to the jacket
"In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved… Read More

An Excursion to the Sky by Grozdana Olujic. 1961 Dutton, first U.S. edition, 156 pages. Olujic was a Serbian author of novels, essays, fairy tales, and children's books. Excursion was her debut novel, published when she was twenty-four years old and inspired comparisons to Francoise Sagan (but make it bleak) and criticism from the "socialist realism" school of thought.
Condition: Jacket VG, some wear, book VG, glue residue on front pastedown
"At that moment I wasn't exactly dying to think of myself. Thinking about oneself, of one thinks honestly, is no special pleasure. I've generally left that satisfaction to other people."

Aphra Behn by V. Sackville-West. 1927 Gerald Howe, first edition, 92 pages. Part of the Representative Women series edited by Francis Birrell: "The series will give in biographical form a picture of female accomplishment throughout the ages." Includes a newspaper clipping of a correction that Sackville-West sent into the Times in 1961 about an article they ran on Aprha Behn. Sackville-West was a British novelist and biographer, companion and lover to Virginia Woolf, and accomplished gardener.
Condition: Good. Shelf wear, missing DJ, owner name on first page.
"But let us say straight away that Aphra Behn is no Shakespeare, the smallest clue to the detail of whose life would be precious and worth pursuing."

A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. 1978 Hill and Wang, first U.S. edition, 234 pages. Barthes was a French philosopher, theorist, critic, and intellectual, who died in 1980 by laundry truck. According to the Washington Post: "In "A Lover's Discourse," he wrote that his investigation of love and desire "has been restored to its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis."" The Lover's Discourse was also heavily featured in Jeffrey Eugenedies's The Marriage Plot as the main accessory for the David Foster Wallace character.
Condition: Jacket in good condition, chip and browning, book in VG condition, some bumps
"Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me."

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein. 1948 Banyan Press, 80 pages, #514 of 626 printed. This was Stein's attempt at the mystery detective genre.

Condition: VG. Gilt fading on the spine, some shelf wear to the boards, slipcase separating at the seams and worn.

"He cried when he was disappointed and fell down when he was angry."

Blue Movie by Andy Warhol. 1970 Grove Press, first edition, 123 pages. "The complete dialogue with over 100 photos." Blue Movie was the first erotic film to receive wide theatrical release in 1969, and was an influence for Last Tango in Paris.
Condition: VG

Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy. 1950 Harcourt Brace, first edition, 212 pages. Collection of seven short stories, some having appeared in the New Yorker and Mademoiselle, including "The Old Men" and "The Blackguard."

Condition: Good/VG. Jacket has many chips and and tear on front cover, see photos. Boards shelf worn, pages clean.

"She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed."

Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel by Luisa Valenzuela. 1976 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, first U.S. edition, 233 pages. An award-winning author from Argentina, Valenzuela's work challenged power structures from a feminist perspective.
Condition: VG. Some shelf wear to boards.
"As you can imagine, I'm seeking total absolution of my sins."

Cliffs of Fall and other stories by Shirley Hazzard. 1963 first U.S. edition, 192 pages. Hazzard was an Australian-American author and essayist best known for her novels Transit of Venus and the Great Fire. Cliffs was her debut, a short-story collection in which all but one of the stories was published in the New Yorker (she was one of the few writers to be discovered in the slush pile). In a review in the New Yorker for her collected stories, Alice Gregory writes of her story "The Picnic," "...Hazzard came upon a theme that preoccupied her for a lifetime: the way love can be at once perishable and, in its reshaping of our minds, permanent."
Condition: Jacket in good condition, with tear top portion of jacket torn away, and chips, book in good condition, owner sticker on end paper, wear to boards
"The Fergusons' door opened on a burst of light and voices, and on Evie's squeal of surprise---quite as if, Minna thought, we had turned up uninvited."

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. 1969 FSG, first edition/printing. Some wear and chips to jacket, owner name on end paper, pages in very good condition. This volume includes thirty stories that spanned her career, including those that appeared in the New Yorker.

"When I woke up that morning, in the fallow light before the sunrise, and remembered that the night before I had got engaged to Rod Stephansson, I could feel my blue eyes growing bluer..."

Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo. 1990 Peter Owen, first UK edition (c/r 1935),157 pages. Chiyo was a Japanese author, magazine founder, and kimono designer who shocked Japanese society with her public love affairs and short bobbed haircut. Later in life she was recognized as a legend and her novels recognized as masterpieces. Confessions was her debut novel and depicts her first major love affair and Japan in the roaring twenties. This edition was the first translated into English.
Condition: VG
"I became so furious I wanted to spit."

Creatures in an Alphabet by Djuna Barnes. 1982 Dial Press, first printing. Barnes was an author and illustrator. She is best known for her modernist novel Nightwood, a 1936 lesbian classic, though she published little afterward due to alcoholism. Creatures was her last work, and was initially conceived as a bestiary for children, although an adult may appreciate it more.
Condition: Jacket in good+ condition, some browning, book in VG condition with inscription on end paper.
"When hovering, the Hummingbird
Is always going home (it's said).
By flying in a single spot
It's striving fast to think it's not."

Devil at Westease by V. Sackville-West. 1947 Doubleday, first edition, 219 pages. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight in The Paris Review starts a wonderful biographical essay on Sackville-West thusly: "How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story: Vita loved several women with exceptional ardor; simultaneously adored her also-bisexual husband, Harold; ultimately came to prefer the company of flora over fauna of any gender; and committed herself to a life of prolific creation (written and planted) that redefined passion itself." Devil at Westease is perhaps Sackville-West's rarest novel and wasn't published in Britain at the time. According to a New York Times review "This new book by V. Sackville-West, poet, novelist,… Read More

Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin. 1982 Knopf, first edition, 272 pages. In a retrospective on Laurie Colwin in the New York Times: "Colwin suggests that our lives are never definitively settled, but evolve as a series of glittering, memorable shards. Her fiction reflects her sense of the shadow around the edges that haunts even our moments of most buoyant, intense delight." and on Family Happiness specifically: "Dutiful wife, mother, daughter and sister Polly Solo-Miller Demarest, "the perfect flower of the Solo-Miller family," learns to balance the needs of her hilariously demanding clan with her own quiet yearnings." Colwin, an accomplished recipe and food writer, died in 1992 at the age of 48 from an aneurysm.
Condition: Jacket and book in VG condition.
"This family had everything: looks, brains, money, a strong, fortified sense of clan, and branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as London, just like a banking house."

Flesh and Paper by Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe. 1986 Ragweed Press, first edition, 64 pages. This dialogue in poems is sensual and lesbian-centered between Indian poet and fabulist Namjoshi and author and activist Hanscombe.
Condition: VG. Price sticker residue on back cover.
"Now we must, creature by creature,
number the ways she has lost us."

Green Song by Edith Sitwell. 1946 View Editions, first U.S. edition, 49 pages. Sitwell was a British critic and poet, known for her lavish costumes, which became the butt of many jokes, and for her wit and support of other writers. The Green Song was published in the middle of her career.
Condition: Jacket acceptable with chips and tears, book in good condition, owner bookplate on front pastedown
"Then, Sun of my life, she went to warm the Dead,
And I must now go sunless in their stead."

The Heir by V. Sackville-West. 1922 George H. Doran, first U.S. edition, 250 pages. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight in The Paris Review starts a wonderful biographical essay on Sackville-West thusly: "How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story..." The Heir is a novella of inheritance and property.
Condition: Good. No DJ, owner name on first page, slight lean to spine, some bumps to the boards
"Mr. Nutley glanced at him with a faint contempt."

How Does Your Garden Grow? by Beverley Nichols, Compton Mackenzie, Marion Cran, V. Sackville-West. Decorations by Nora S. Unwin. 1935 Doubleday, first U.S. edition. Includes essays on gardening by these four British writers. Beverly Nichols was an accomplished novelist and playright, Compton Mackenzie was a proud Scottish activist and writer, Marion Cran was the first woman gardening broadcaster, and Vita Sackville-West was an unconventional, accomplished novelist, essayist, gardener, and lover and companion to Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefiss, and others.
Condition: Jacket in good condition, tear on front cover on head and tail of spine, tear on back cover, book in good condition, wear and discoloring to boards, bookstore sticker on front pastedown, stamp on end paper, see photos.
"The true gardener is always wanting to rearrange and to improve his schemes."