Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.

A cycle of lyric poems evoking love and loss: set in Shimla, in the Himalayala mountains, and in the old Viceregal Lodge --  now called Rashtrapati Nivas.

15pp.; ca. 6.25 x 9.25 inches.
 

Limited to 150 copies, signed by Alexander: 

125 in red handmade wrappers, string-tied. $40

25 in patterned cloth. $125

On December 5, 2011, on the Paris Review Daily, we wrote about the survey on symbolism high school student and budding science fiction writer Bruce McAllister sent to 150 writers in 1963. PRD posted a number of replies from Kerouac, Mailer, Rand, Bellow, Updike, Ellison, and Bradbury.

The San Diego Union Tribune picked up the story a few days later and contacted not only McAllister himself, as had we, but also current teachers and students at his high school.

During the past week we have enjoyed following many of the discussions these surveys have engendered. Many readers have remarked on Ayn Rand’s less than generous response (the Atlantic Wire headlined, “Ayn Rand Was Meaner Than You Think").  As an antidote to that, we are happy to post today Joseph Heller’s thoughtful survey and cover letter.

Others have expressed an interest in the handwriting of individual authors, to which we respond with the survey of Richard Hughes. Hughes breaks each question down into its parts, signs and dates his survey, and offers a postscript turning the question of symbolism in literature, tidily, back onto McAllister: “Have you considered the extent to which subconscious symbol-making is part of the process of reading, quite distinct from its part in writing?”

An important collection documenting the life and work of Virginia Woolf, the woman who helped to bring literature -- and women -- from the Victorian age into the modern era. Beekman's collection spans Woolf's entire life, shining a light into her youth and adolescence, her familial and romantic relationships over time, her printing and publishing work at The Hogarth Press and, of course, her own writing.

Featuring original color photographs by David Levinthal.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time, at The Forbes Gallery in New York City, from November 21, 2011 – January 14, 2012.

134 pp.; 9 x 6 in., pictorial wrappers, $65

Deluxe limited edition, one of 25 copies, slipcased with a limited print numbered and signed by Levinthal. $2500

A presentation copy of the 1946 Modern Library edition of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, inscribed to Phil Stone, Faulkner’s early literary mentor, later friend, and dedicatee of all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy.

Faulkner’s relationship with Phil Stone, an Oxford native and Yale graduate four years his senior, was  seminal. When in 1915, at the age of 18, Faulkner determined not to return to high school for his junior year, Phil Stone took on the role of tutor. Faulkner’s brother John later recalled,

The Stones had a big old Studebaker touring car, a sever-passenger affair. Phil loaded it with books for Bill to read and turned the car over to him. Bill would go out on some country road, a side road where it was quiet, and park the car and spend the day reading. He taught himself French out there and later he actually taught French at the University. Phil’s guidance was good, for it put the finishing touches on the reading program that Mother had established in all of us…. What Phil picked for Bill to read was pretty much what she would have chosen. Bill read Plato, Socrates, the Greek poets, all the good Romans and Shakespeare. He also read the other good English writers and the French and German classics. (My Brother Bill, 130)

Two years later, when Faulkner’s beloved Estelle announced her engagement to another man, Stone got Faulkner a job in bookstore in New Haven. In 1924 he underwrote – and contributed a preface to – The Marble Faun, Faulkner’s first commercially published book and only commercially published volume of poetry. Throughout the earliest years in Faulkner’s career Stone remained his champion, steadfast in his belief in his young friend’s brilliance. Many of Faulkner’s literary submissions, in fact, were typed in Stone’s local law office. In later years, though Stone served as the local expert on Faulkner, their closeness suffered intermittent periods of turmoil, such as is seen between the closest of friends. This did not prevent Faulkner from dedicating all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy to Stone (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, 1940-1959); nor inscribing this Modern Library edition of two of his best-known works, three years prior to his receipt of the Nobel Prize; nor did it mitigate Stone’s profound sense of loss at Faulkner’s passing in 1962. Fittingly, this man who carried Faulkner financially and emotionally into his career, was a pall bearer at his funeral.

Ken Kesey's December 1986 response to a questionnaire posed by writer James L. Harmon, who wrote to influential writers, actors, musicians, and other well-known individuals, requesting they answer the prompt, “If you could offer the young people of today one piece of advice, what would it be?”

Harmon accumulated ‘advice,’ he notes in his introduction, for over a decade. His collection was eventually published in 2002’s Take Their Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two, in which Kesey's piece appears.