Rare & Collectible Books

Jack Fitzsimons - Bungalow Bliss - 1st Edition 1971

It's unlikley any other publication had as much of an impact on the landcsape of Ireland - and rural Ireland in particular - as Bungalow Bliss.  This is the first edition, first printing, 1971 , containing 20 home designs.  In the dustjacket,...

Edward Garner - To Die By Inches : The Famine in North East Cork - PB 1986

Published by Éigse Books, Fermoy  1986.  A particularly hard to find book , published only in a small print run.  Condition - heavy tanning to pages, binding tight, the edge of the front cover is dogeared in the corner.  Edward...

Cosaint Shibhialta - Bás Beatha - PB ( 1965 Irish Civil Defence booklet on Survival in a Nuclear War )

Booklet, 56 pages, stapled. The punched hole in the upper corner is part of the design.  A 1965 Irish government Civil Defence booklet issued to give advice to houseowners and farmers on surving nuclear war and fallout ( the emphasis on fallout...

James Merrill - The Fire Screen - HB 1972 ( Phoenix Poets Series)

A poetry collection , published by Chatto & Windus/ Hogarth Press 1972.  Lacks the original dustjacket, solid in orange cloth with titles in gilt to spine, with Phoenix motif to cover.  Part of the Phoenix Living Poets series. 

Pierre Choderlos De Laclos - Dangerous Acquaintances ( Les Liaisons Dangereuses) - Vintage PB

An epistolary novel chronicles the cruel seduction of a young girl by two ruthless, 18th-century aristocrats. Translated from the original French by Richard Adlington. Originally published 1782, first publihsed in this translation 1952, and this Four...

Russell Braddon - End of a Hate - Vintage Pan PB 1960

Russell Braddon was born in Sydney in 1921. In addition to The Naked Island, his bestselling memoir of four years spent as a prisoner of war during the Second World War, he also wrote a number of biographies, novels, histories and TV scripts. He lived in...

Daphne du Maurier - Frenchman's Creek - Vintage Pan PB 1976

A novel set in Cornwall at the time of Charles II, which tells the story of the relationship between a beautiful and capricious lady and a dangerous but attractive French pirate. A Pan paperback edition 1976, originally 1941.   

Fógra Fáilte Ireland - Official Guide to Donegal - 1954 - PB

Fógra Fáilte was set up in 1952 , and was renamned relativley quickly as the modern Bord Fáilte in 1955.  A number of county and regional travel guides were produced in these years, this is a typical issue, with central section...

Patrick S Dinneen - A Smaller Irish-English Dictionary for the Use of Schools - HB 1933 - ( Foclóir an Duinnínigh)

A 1933 edition (abridged) of the 1904 original, published in this instance 'for the use of Schools' by Gill Dublin, in association with the Irish Texts Society   Condition - see photos of covers, covers are faded, the original titles were in a...

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Selected Poetry and Prose - HB Modern Libraray Ed 1951

Gathers all of the nineteenth-century poet's works, including "Queen Mab," "The Cenci," "Alastor," and "Prometheus Unbound" This edition Modern Library US, 1951, Small format hardcover. lacks the original dustjacket.  Edited with an Introduction by...

Ernest Hemingway - By-Line : 75 Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades - PB

A collection of essays and reportage ( from 1920 to 1956) by Hemingway .  Penguin PB , 1970  

Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little Town on the Prairie (Vintage Paperback)

Previous owners name in red ink on inside front endpapers.  This Puffin edition 1978, originally published 1941. 

Anthony Trollope - Phineas Finn ( A Pallisers Novel) Vintage Paperback - 1973

A 1973 PB edition, issued as a BBC TV tie in edition. Originally published in 1869. Heavy age tanning to pages, but binding tight, no marks or inscriptions.  The second of Trollope's "Palliser" novels introduces its title character, Phineas Finn, a...

Simon Armitage - Book of Matches - PB - 1993

Losing none of the exuberance which has become a hallmark of Simon Armitage's poetry, these poems are more personal. The book is divided into three sections - the "Book of Matches" which are sonnets, "Becoming of Age" and "Reading the Bans", a series of...

Wakter Hoyt French & Charles Brockway Hale ( Editors) - Middle English Metrical Romances ( Volume 2) - hb 1964

Volume 2 of a set ( but standalone in it's own accord Contents - Sir Perceval of Galles. The avowing of Arthur -- Composites: Ipomadon (selections). Eger and Grime. The squire of low degree -- The matter of the Orient: The seven sages of Rome...

Bleisce - Doon Parish Journal ( Issue 20) - December 2011

The annual Doon Journal , 2011. Doon is a town and associated surrounds not far from the Limerick Tipperary border in East Limerick.  With parish news, sport, history, photographs etc.  272 pages

Jackie Collins - Hollywood Husbands ( Vintage PB 1987)

They lunch at Ma Maison on salads and hot gossip. They cruise Rodeo Drive, turning shopping at Giorgio and Gucci into an art form. These are Hollywood wives and they hold the keys to the kingdom. But when your ticket to ride is a famous husband, there...

Frederick Rolfe - Hadrian the Seventh - PB 1982 ( Originally 1904)

Hadrian VII by Frederick William Rolfe  (Baron Corvo) This text is a novel of thwarted ambition and ecclesiastical wish-fulfillment. When a set of curious circumstances propels George Arthur Rose from despised obscurity to the throne of St Peter, in...

Daphne du Maurier - Vanishing Cornwall - HB 1967

Daphne du Maurier made Cornwall her home for most of her life and has shown her love and knowledge of all things Cornish in some of her greatest successes, Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, Jamaica Inn and many of her other much-loved books.In this 1967 book...

Robert Graves - The Crowning Privilege - Vintage PB 1959

Originally published 1955, this reprint 1959.  Subtitled ' A selection of lectures and essays concerned with professional standards in poetry'

Jacob Smallwood - The Face of Newfoundland - HB - 1977

A photographic guide to the Canadian province of Newfoundland, published 1977, covering townas, people, industry, landscape and much more.  Large format hardcover, illustrations and photography in colour. 

Rio Ferdinand - My Decade as a Red - HB 1ST Edition Manchester United 2013

  Publisher by Bonnier UK, 2013 - it covers Ferdinand's ten years at Utd from 2002-2012, ( some of the most successful years for the club) as well as his time at West Ham,  Leeds, and as an England international. Illustrated throughout in full...

Susan Stebbing - Thinking to Some Purpose - PB - 1959 ( Originally 1939)

Gordon L Rottman - Guam 1941 & 1944 - Loss and Reconquest - HB ( Battles of World War II)

Hardcover, published by Osprey UK, 2009, originally 2004. Osprey are probably the preeminent publisher of battle histories, with detailed account sof forces, military commanders, how battles progessed , with maps, period photographs etc. 

Derek Mahon - The Hunt by Night - PB - 1982

Paperback, pubished by OUP, 1982. Creasing and bumps to covers, partial price sticker from Dundrum Bookshop on the back cover.  0192119532. 

Peter Fallon & Sean Golden ( Editors) - Soft Day : A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing - PB - 1980

An anthology of 36 Irish writers published by Notre Dame Press, 1980. Poetry is most prominent, but also short stories, prose, drama and translations. ncluding: Liam O'Flaherty, Samuel Beckett, Mary Lavin, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and more...

Edward de Bono - Lateral Thinking - A Textbook of Creativity - PB - 1978

HE classic work about improving creativity from world-renowned writer and philosopher Edward de Bono.In schools we are taught to meet problems head-on: what Edward de Bono calls 'vertical thinking'. This works well in simple situations - but we are at a...

Tom Wolfe - From Bauhaus to Our House - PB

Originally publisehd as a series of articles in Harper's Magazine, this is Tom Wolfe's tongue in cheek account of of modern architecture in the USA.  Pocket Books 1981. 

P.G Wodehouse - Company for Henry - PB 1983 ( Originally 1967)

The titular Henry is Henry Paradenen whom after a career treading the boards has unexpectedly inherited Ashby Hall and the families associated financial obligations. American multi-millionaire relative J. Wendell Stickney and has arrived and Henry is...

W Carter Platts - The Young Angler ( Young Sportsman's Library) - HB 1966 ( Originally 1940)

A good all-round introduction to angling - flyfishing, coarse, salmon, trout, grayling, perch, pike, roach, barbel, boat and pier fishing, rock and surf fishing, big game fishing and a chapter on the sea and the fly rod. Aimed at a newly mobile audience...

Nevil Shute - Ruined City | An Old Captivity ( 2 Book Lot - Vintage Pan )

Ruined City - When Henry Warren, director of an English bank, lands by chance in a hospital in a bleak Northern town that has been ruined by the closure of its shipyard, he discovers nothing less than a new purpose for his life. Moved by the fate of the...

André Maurois - The Art of Writing - PB 1962 ( Originally 1957)

A collection of essays, examining the techniques and literary output of a number of notable European writers - Voltaire, Rousseau, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Goethe, Chekhov, Gogol and Turgenev.  Dutton USA 1962. Originally published in...

George Byron ( Lord Byron) - Don Juan - Vintage HB Modern Library Edition1949

Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where...

Sean O'Brien - The Indoor Park - PB - 1983

Published by Bloodaxe Books, UK, 1983, a review slip is loosely laid in.  Aggressive, witty and dramatic, Sean O'Brien's poems convey the texture of imaginative life, not just its recorded highlights. Sean O'Brien's territory is urban pastoral. Its...

John Clare - Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare ( Edited by Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield) - HB 1967

A selection of the great Romantic 'peasant poet' John Clare to making available the full range of his accomplishment - as the chronicler of nature and childhood, the champion of folkways in the face of enclosure and oppression, the love poet, the...

Edmund Crispin - Frequent Hearses - Penguin Crime

Amodern reprint edition using the green and white period style Penguin Crime cover design.  Crease to spine, otherwise very good.  Stars, starlets, floozies and factotums of the film world - Gervase Fen suspects them all.When young actress...

Max Murray - The Sunshine Corpse - HB 1954

1st UK EDITION, published by Michael Joseph UK, 1954.  Small format hardcover in an attractive period dustjacket.  Previous owners name sstamped to fronty blank endpage, the corner of which is also ( coloured in) in red for some reason. Price...

Ian R. Macleod - The Light Ages - HB - 2003

Hardcover 1st UK Edition, Earthlight UK, 2003.  Uneven age spotting and tanning to page block.  Alternate history/ fantasy SF that imagines a world where the Industrial Revolution started much earlier.. In the year 1678, Joshua Wagstaffe...

James A Coleman - Relativity for the Layman - PB - 1972

Published by Pelican UK in this revised edition, 1972, subtitled  ' a simplifiued account of the history, theory and proofs of relativity'  Initially published 1954.  In excellent condition. 

Michael Banton - Racial Minorities - PB 1972

Published by Fontana UK, 1972. Banton bases his study of racial minorities in post war Britain - examining social isolation of immigrants in the UK, urban pressurea, and the relationships between immigrant and host society.  Banton spent his long...

Alan Moorehead - The Fatal Impact : An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840

When Captain Cook entered the Pacific in 1769, it was a virgin ocean, pristine and savage, and its inhabitants lived a life of primeval innocence. Seventy years later, firearms, disease and alcohol had hammered away at this way of life until it crumbled...

Robert Conquest - The Nation Killers : A study of Genocide in Stalin's Russia - PB 1972

Originally published 1970, this paperback edition 1972. Some underlining in pen to the introductory chapters.  Explores the littleknownpurges of 1943-4 when Stalin deported natives of the North Caucasus and Crimea to Siberia and Central Asia. The...

Guy de Maupassant - Bel-Ami - Vintage Penguin Classics Ed - 1961

Guy de Maupassant's scandalous tale of an opportunistic young man corrupted by the allure of power, Bel-Ami is translated with an introduction by H.N.P Sloman. Young, attractive and very ambitious, George Duroy, known to his admirers as Bel-Ami, is...

W.W Bartley - Wittgenstein (A Biography) 2nd Edition 1985)

A short and very accessible biography. Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein tends to be widely and divergently interpreted - there is little consensus as to what his philosophy really means. Not helped, also, by his later work (encapsulated in the...

W.B Gallie - Peirce and Pragmatism - Vintage Pelican PB 1952

Condition - spine darkened heavily, internally very good, light tanning only.  Peirce's pragmatism was the first time the scientific method was proposed as an epistemology for philosophical questions. A theory that succeeds better than its rivals in...

Robert B. Downs - Books That Changed the World - PB ( Originally 1956)

Originally published 1956. this is a discussion of 16 notable books from history which had a profound impact on science, history and human debelopment ( for bad or good) The range runs from Machiavelli's the Prince, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, to...

Ivan Illich - The Right to Useful Employment | Deschooling Society ( 2 book Lot) - VIntage PB

The Right to Useful Emplotyment ( Originally 1978) -0714526630 Published by Marion Boyars UK, paperback Monograph on a philosophy for restoring quality of life to modern society - contends that autonomous activities, in which both rich and poor people...

Mark Twain / A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Vintage PB

When A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of...

Robert Gibbings - Lovely is the Lee : Hardcover 1945 - Illustrated Cork Galway Travel - US Edition

A hardcover first US edition ( originally 1945) of Robert Gibbings's Lovely is the Lee, published by H Woolf, New York. The title is slightly misleading, as the book is as much about Galway and Conamara as it is about Cork, half being given to each...

AA Alcoholics Anonymous ''Big Book'' HB 1970 3rd Edition - 12 Step Programme, Addiction, Alcohol ,

One of the most influential books of the 20th century (given the impact it had and the amount of editions produced)  This is the 'Big Book' or 'Big Blue Book' as its also known, UK third printing 1970, based on the second US revised edition...

Alcoholics Anonymous - HB 3rd Edition 1958 - Addiction 12 steps - Classic

One of the most inflential books of the 20th century ( yes, seriously, given the impact it had and the amount of editions produced)  This is the 'Big Book' as its also known, third  UK printing 'new and revised' ( from 1958), based on the US...

Robert O'Byrne - Luggala Days : The Story of a Guinness House - HB 1st Edition 2012

Hidden inside a secluded Irish valley lies Luggala, an exquisite eighteenth-century house at the centre of a 5,000-acre estate. In 1937 Ernest Guinness presented Luggala to his youngest daughter, Oonagh – one of the three famous ‘Golden...