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  • "Memory believes before knowing remembers": First Edition of William Faulkner’s Light In August; Inscribed by Him

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Light In August.

    New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas 1932.

    First edition, first issue, with first printing statement on copyright page, and “Jefferson” for “Mottstown” on page 340, line 1; first-issue binding, lettered in blue and orange. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Eric Dawson William Faulkner Oxford 3 October 1934.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Petersen A13a; Howard A13.1a; Massey 103. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed, with only two examples appearing at auction in the last 90 years.

    Price: $40,000.00     Item Number: 135388

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  • “He dont have to move very far to go nuts in the first place and so he dont have so far to come back": Rare original carbon typescrip of Faulkner's Pylon

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Pylon.

    Oxford, Mississippi: N/P c. 1934.

    Rare original carbon typescript of the novel Pylonwith title in ink in the author’s hand on the first page, a few leaves repaginated in the author’s hand, 344 pages, each of the six chapters held together with a paper clip, [Oxford, Mississippi, ca. December 1934]. Newly discovered by the family and one of only two known typescripts of Pylon, it is the only one left entirely as Faulkner wrote it and is the only one in private hands. William Faulkner’s retained unedited carbon typescript of his 1935 aviation novel, Pylon. This copy corresponds to the typescript setting copy in the collection of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. The present copy is important in that it shows Faulkner’s text in its unedited state.  In his introduction to the facsimile of the typesetting copy, Noel Polk writes, “According to Faulkner’s date on the final page of the holograph manuscript at the University of Mississippi, he completed the writing on November 26, 1934; but he had already sent [publisher Harrison] Smith the typescript of the first chapter before November 5, the second by November 23, and the third by November 30; the fourth bears the editorial date 12/5, the fifth 12/10, and the sixth and seventh 12/15.  As was to the case with Absalom, Pylon underwent extensive editorial alteration.  As the typescript setting copy … demonstrates, editors bowlerized and ‘normalized’ the deliberate strangeness of the syntax and language and made hundreds of other rather arbitrary changes in the text.  Smith, who spent a week in Oxford with Faulkner going over the galleys, had made many further editorial changes on them. The galleys, which were set beginning January 8, record both Faulkner’s acquiescence to many of Smith’s changes, his attempts to restore the original wording and punctuation, and numerous attempts to repair damage that Smith had done. Pylon was published on March 25, 1935.”The incomplete 151-page autograph manuscript of the novel is in the collection of the University of Mississippi.  The typescript setting copy at the University of Virginia and the present carbon typescript are the only known complete typescripts of the text.  Corrected galley proofs are held by the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.  Noel Polk based his 1985 corrected text (Library of America) on the Alderman Library typescript. As Faulkner told students at the University of Virginia in the 1960’s, he wrote Pylon as a respite from the complications involved in writing Absalom, Absalom! The novel was written at great speed at the end of 1934.  It has been called Faulkner’s most self-consciously “modernistic” work, abounding in descriptions of aviators and their machines, runways, and art deco air terminals.  Aside from the frequent references to Shakespeare in the novel, Faulkner takes pains to pay tribute to his modernist heroes James Joyce (in the second chapter, “An Evening in New Valois”) and T. S. Eliot (throughout the novel, but especially in the penultimate chapter, “Lovesong of J. A. Prufrock”). Pylon is one of Faulkner’s few non-Yoknapatawpha novels and is based on the festivities and air shows at New Orleans’s newly built Shushan Airport, held to coincide with Mardi Gras, February 1934. In very good condition with the first leaf darkened and with paper loss at edges (some text lost in lower right corner), rust stain in upper right corner of chapters 1–4, creasing and spotting to scattered leaves. Laid in: 2 British European Airways luggage claim tags. This carbon typescript, newly discovered by the family and one of only two known typescripts of Pylon, is the only one left entirely as Faulkner wrote it and is the only one in private hands.

    Price: $40,000.00     Item Number: 140100

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  • First Edition of William Faukner's Soldiers' Pay; In the Original Dust jacket

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Soldiers’ Pay.

    New York: Boni & Liveright 1926.

    First edition of Faulkner’s first book in the rare first state dust jacket with An American Tragedy as the first of five titles listed on the rear jacket panel. Octavo, original cloth. Bookplate, near fine in an exceptional dust jacket with light toning and wear. From the library of Virginia bibliophile and historian Christopher Clark Geest with his bookplate. Housed in a custom clamshell box. Scarce in this condition.

    Price: $28,000.00     Item Number: 89328

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  • First Edition of William Faukner's Soldiers' Pay; In the Original Dust jacket

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Soldiers’ Pay.

    New York: Boni & Liveright 1926.

    First edition of Faulkner’s first book in the rare first state dust jacket with An American Tragedy as the first of five titles listed on the rear jacket panel. Octavo, original cloth. Bookplate, near fine in a very good dust jacket with some toning to the spine and some chipping to the extremities. Housed in a custom clamshell box. Rare and desirable.

    Price: $18,500.00     Item Number: 81010

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  • "What threatens us today is fear": The original typed manuscript of Faulkner's important public address to his daughter Jill's graduating class at University High School in Oxford Mississippi; with autograph corrections and deletions in his hand

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Address to the Graduating Class of 1951 of University High School, Oxford, Mississippi.

    : .

    The original typed manuscript of Faulkner’s important public address to his daughter Jill’s graduating class at University High School in Oxford Mississippi with autograph corrections and deletions in his hand. Three pages, carbon typescript, the text contains 8 strikethroughs and 6 autograph corrections in Faulkner’s hand in ink. In this important public address, Faulkner clarifies for a young audience the terms for survival and optimism in the Cold War era, ideas which he first expressed publicly five months earlier in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In the spring of 1951, Faulkner was in Paris, New York, and Lexington, Kentucky, where he covered the Kentucky Derby for Sports Illustrated. He had planned to return to Oxford and resume work on Requiem for a Nunhowever, “Jill had telephoned him in New York to say that the principal of the high school had asked if he would talk to her high-school class.  It sounded like some sort of informal talk, and he found it difficult to refuse Jill anything within reason. On arriving home, he found that it was the featured address at the commencement ceremonies for her graduating class. He would have to write another speech, for a formal event before more than a thousand people” (Blotner). In addressing the graduating seniors and their families, Faulkner begins with the threat of the atomic bomb and informs his audience that there are more sinister forces then even the bomb at work in the post-war world. As early as 1945, he had expressed in private letters his distaste for communism and the Soviet Union. He chose not to name these threats to individuality and personal freedom in his Nobel speech. Here, by contrast, he zeroes in on his target: “Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery—giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for; — the economies or ideologies or political systems, communist, or socialist or democratic… whatever they wish to call themselves, who would reduce man to one obedient mass for their own aggrandizement and power, or because they themselves are baffled and afraid, afraid of, or incapable of, believing in man’s capacity for courage and endurance and sacrifice.” The typescript reads: “man’s capacity for courage and honor and compassion and sacrifice.” Toughening his stance and reinforcing his tempered pessimism, he scores through “honor and compassion,” replacing them with “endurance” in ink. After exhorting the students to retain their individuality, and thus change life on earth,  he ends by telling them: “In one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers, Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.” As in Stockholm, Faulkner spoke softly and rapidly and many in the audience could not understand his words, despite the fact that a he was using a public-address system.  It was the largest graduation audience Oxford had ever seen and the applause was thunderous.  At four and a half minutes, it was also the shortest graduation address on record. In near fine condition. This major public address, often overshadowed by the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, shows William Faulkner as vigilant Cold Warrior, distinguished citizen of Oxford and proud parent of a graduating high school senior.

    Price: $17,500.00     Item Number: 135874

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  • "A Faulkner oddity with a most interesting genesis and publication history": Three original typed drafts of William Faulkner's short story Afternoon of a Cow. By Ernest V. Trueblood

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Afternoon of a Cow Original Typed Manuscript Drafts.

    : .

    Three original typed drafts of William Faulkner’s parodical short story “Afternoon of a Cow.  By Ernest V. Trueblood.” Two complete copies, each 17 leaves; bound with brass clasps in green folders with the third copy lacking the first leaf; with 49 strikethroughs in Faulkner’s hand throughout most excising a single word. When Faulkner returned to Oxford at the end of World War I, he was writing poetry, much of it under the influence of the French Symbolists.  In the summer of 1919, he borrowed Mallarmé’s title, “L’Après-midi d’un Faune,” for a 40-line poem of frustrated love. The poem appeared in The New Republicon 16 August was a revised version appeared in The Mississippian at Ole Miss in the fall.  Early the next year he was to publish in Oxford a poem inviting comparison with François Villon, “Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues.” As Joseph Blotner says diplomatically, “Such poetry unsurprisingly provoked various responses.”  Parodies began to appear in The Mississippian.  One was “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue,” signed by “Lordgreyson.” The poem described the heifer Betsey, lost and wandering far from home. “It was an amusing tour de force, which Faulkner may have had in mind seventeen years later, ‘one afternoon,’ he recalled, ‘when I felt rotten with a terrible hangover.’  He was then working unhappily at Twentieth Century-Fox” (Blotner). “The story generates interest because it uses Faulkner himself as a character, much in the manner of a post-modernist writer such as Paul Auster. The story reports on a frightened cow that has fallen into a ditch during a fire. The character Faulkner, along with Oliver, a black butler, and Ernest V. Trueblood, the first-person narrator of the tale, rush to rescue the cow, but they are at first unsuccessful. In its fear and distress, the cow empties its bladder and bowels upon Faulkner, shattering the dignity of the scene. The story ends with Faulkner stripping in the door of the stable and washing. Latter, wrapped in a horse blanket, he and his friends drink to the cow” (Fargnoli & Golay). Faulkner was very fond of this story and thought it particularly funny. On 25 June 1937, he read the story to his guests after dinner in Los Angeles, telling them it was the work of a talented boy named Ernest V. Trueblood. The only person who seemed to appreciate the story was his house guest and French translator, Maurice Coindreau. The Frenchman was in Los Angeles to discuss his translation of The Sound and the Fury, which became one of the most influential and celebrated literary translations of the century. Faulkner gave Coindreau a carbon typescript of the translation as a souvenir. In 1939, Faulkner was to appropriate elements of the story for the mock chivalric romantic treatment of Ike Snopes’s love for Jack Houston’s cow in The Hamlet. During the war, Faulkner approved Coindreau’s translation of the story, published in the June/July number of Fontaine in Algiers. It first appeared in English in Furiosoin 1947 and was anthologized by Dwight Macdonald in a collection of parodies in 1950. In very good condition.

    Price: $15,000.00     Item Number: 139485

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  • "The past is never dead. It's not even past": First Edition of Requiem for a Nun; Inscribed by William Faulkner to Editor John Bott and with an original drawing

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Requiem for a Nun.

    London: Chatto & Windus 1953.

    First British edition of the sequel to Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication on the title page and with an original drawing by Faulkner on the front free endpaper, “For John Bott William Faulkner New York 3 Mar 1953.” The recipient, John Bott was the City Editor of the New York Post who wore leg braces his whole life due to polio. Bott’s friend had just brought him the book from London. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Paul Hogarth. A unique example with a wonderful association and with a rare original drawing from the Nobel Prize-winning writer.

    Price: $12,500.00     Item Number: 144084

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  • FIRST EDITION OF FAULKNER’S MASTERPIECE AND ONE OF THE GREATEST NOVELS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE SOUND AND THE FURY: IN THE RARE FIRST ISSUE DUST JACKET

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    The Sound and the Fury.

    New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith 1929.

    First edition of Faulkner’s masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth, black and white patterned paper boards. Near fine in a very good unrestored first-issue dust jacket with the iconic design by Kathe Kollwitz on the front panel and a price of $3.00 for the book Humanity Uprooted on the rear panel, with a chip to the spine. Petersen A6.2a. Brucolli & Clark I:121. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

    Price: $12,500.00     Item Number: 112328

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  • First Edition of William Faulkner's Intruder In The Dust; Inscribed by Him to his Cousin

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Intruder In The Dust.

    New York: Random House 1948.

    First edition of this classic Faulkner novel, which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Sally Burns William Faulkner 16 April.” The recipient Sallie Faulkner Burns was William Faulkner‘s first cousin and was a great friend to Maud, William‘s mother. This was given to her by Faulkner and has remained in the family until now. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with a touch of rubbing. Jacket design by E. McKnight Kauffer. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

    Price: $12,500.00     Item Number: 114816

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  • William Faulkner's Officer of the Légion d'Honneur

    [FAULKNER, WILLIAM].

    Officer of the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur Diploma Awarded to William Faulkner.

    : Republique Francaise 1949.

    Partially printed diploma awarded to William Faulkner as an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur, conferred on him be the French government five months after he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. One page, partially printed and completed in a calligraphic hand, the diploma is signed by three French officials with an embossed seal. In near fine condition. Matted. The entire piece measures 15 inches by 18.5 inches. From the collection of William Faulkner.

    Price: $12,000.00     Item Number: 139733

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