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36 DOCTOROW, E. L. Welcome to Hard Times. New York: The New American Library, 1961 Presented to Ayn Rand from her editor First paperback edition, presentation copy, inscribed on the title page “to Ayn Rand with Best Wishes – E. L. Doctorow October 14, 1963”. Before becoming a full-time writer, Doctorow spent nearly a decade in the publishing world, beginning at Signet / New American Library in 1960. Here he would work with a number of important authors, including Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand. This presentation copy is therefore entirely appropriate for it is the first Signet / New American Library paperback edition. The edition was preceded by a hardback edition in the previous year, published by Simon and Schuster. Doctorow oversaw the paperback publication of many of Rand’s works, including Atlas Shrugged , Anthem , For the New Intellectual , The Virtue of Selfishness , and We the Living . Welcome to Hard Times was Doctorow’s debut novel, an “anti- western” set in Dakota Territory, concerning a small town’s moral struggle to resist the evil ravages of outsider, “The Bad Man From Bodie”. The subject may have interested Rand, who frequently wrote about the baneful influence of violence in civil society: “One does not and cannot ‘negotiate’ with brutality, nor give it the benefit of the doubt”. The novel was the basis for Burt Kennedy’s 1967 American Western film starring Henry Fonda, Janice Rule, Warren Oates and Aldo Ray.
Octavo. Original illustrated wrappers, lettering to spine in black and purple, edges red. Slight lean to spine and very slightly sunned, short crease to top corner of front cover, extremities very slightly rubbed, consistent light browning; a near-fine copy. ¶ Ayn Rand, “Brief Comments”, The Objectivist , March 1969. £3,750 [151382] 37 DONNE, John. The Poems. New York: The Grolier Club, 1895 The publisher’s own copy First Grolier Club edition, one of 380 copies printed on handmade paper, in a handsome binding by Zaehnsdorf dated 1899. This is Theodore Low De Vinne’s copy, founder member and printer of the Grolier Club for two decades, and designer of most of its publications. The Grolier Club edition is a landmark in the editorial tradition of Donne’s poetry, which “established the crucial – and unprecedented – policy of using the earliest seventeenth-century printing as copy-text for each poem” (Stringer, p. LXXXVI). This was the first critical edition of Donne, edited by two of the most prominent American scholars of the time. Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), professor of Art History at Harvard, prepared the text drawing from the “many hundreds” marginal annotations and corrections made by the late James Russell Lowell (1845–1895), poet and professor of Literature at Harvard, to the Boston edition of 1855. In his introduction, Norton pays a tribute to Lowell’s memory and to his work on Donne: “Donne’s Poems were, from an early period of his life, among Mr Lowell’s favourite books . . . It seemed a pity that this work should be lost, and the Grolier Club
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