On the 16th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . brand-new Babbitt's Books T-shirts and totes by nonaffiliated clothing. And a magnificent sale!

First up are T-shirts, which come in two designs. Design A features a (Brian-esque) bookseller scratching his head over a stack of books, and is red with grey-silver lettering. 

Design B features a (Sarah-esque) bookseller in a stall offering a book to a customer, and is navy blue with grey-silver lettering. 

Both T-shirts say babbittsbooks.com across the shoulders. The tees are printed on Jerzees heavyweight blend (50% cotton and 50% polyester) and have the soft feel of a well-loved T-shirt--not the stiff, coarse feel of a Hanes heavyweight tee. They are priced at $15 apiece and range in size from a men's small to a men's XL. 

The totes are 12" by 12" and also come in two designs, which are in the style of old bookplates. You have your choice of several colors, as both the designs featured above come on black totes with white ink. The "Antiquarius" owl comes in green ink as well as maroon. Like the T-shirts, the totes read babbittsbooks.com across the backs. They're yours for $9 apiece. 


That isn't all, though. If you participate in our online sale and purchase $75 of merchandise, you will automatically get a free tote of your choice. Bear in mind, though, that this offer is only while supplies last. As for the online sale, here are the details:


Use the code "Holiday 2010" and you receive 25% of all orders over $25. This offer is good for all books, especially rare and expensive ones. (Had your eye on a $1000 book? It's yours for $750 with this sale.) Better still, media-mail shipping is free. Just e-mail us at sales@babbittsbooks.com with your selections and mention the code. You can buy your T-shirts in person or through e-mail. We'll help you work out payment details. 

This sale is only good until midnight on Sunday, December 12th, so be sure to get your orders in as soon as possible. 

On the 17th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . a 1927 Art Deco copy of Oscar Wilde's play, Salome. 

Salome was originally written in 1893, three years after Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published. Wilde was fluent in French and the play was originally released en français. His lover, Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), was given the honor of translating the play into English, but his French was so poor that Wilde ended up scrapping most of Bosie's translations and doing his own, which led to animosity between the two. The English translation was published in 1894, and included beautiful illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Our copy, sadly, is not the Beardsley version, but does have lavish illustrations by John Vassos, which are none the less beautiful as you can see for yourself.

Salome is the one-act story of Salome, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas (the very same Herod that sent Jesus to his death in the Bible), who, in exchange for performing the exotic striptease Dance of the Seven Veils, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The play premiered in Paris in 1896, but its author was not there to see it. 


In 1895, Wilde went on trial for sodomy and was imprisoned in mid-1895. The playwright's two-year stay in jail did considerable damage to his health and he never convalesced. When he was released he set about penning a long prose poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, inspired by events during his incarceration. Since Wilde's name was unpleasantly infamous following the charges of homosexuality, the poem was initially published under the pseudonym C.3.3., Wilde's cell-block number. The author died destitute on November 30th, 1900. 


Babbitt's has at least one copy of this poem. The copy featured here is undated, but the Art Nouveau peacock design on the front board puts it around 1910. The exterior is slightly faded. However, the interior is as bright and crisp as the day it came off the press. 

If you'd rather just read Salome before committing to a collectible copy, we also have a $3 copy published by Three Sirens Press. This copy is bound together with (a marked-up) Dorian Gray, but Salome is clean--and has the signature Aubrey Beardsley illustrations.

Wilde might have been too radical for the 19th century, but his continued popularity proves that the 21st century does not think him too avant-garde; here at Babbitt's Books, we can barely keep a copy of Dorian Gray in stock. This stanza from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, chiseled onto Wilde's tomb, confirms it.


And alien tears will fill for him,
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

Title: Salome: A Tragedy in One Act

Publisher: E.P. Dutton & Company

Year: 1927

Features: Illustrated by John Vassos

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $18

Title: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Publisher: John W. Luce & Company

Year: circa 1910

Condition: Good+

Price: $25

Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray / Salome

Publisher: Three Sirens Press

Year: 1931

Features: Illustrated by Lui Trugo and Aubrey Beardsley

Condition: Good+

Price: $3

On the 18th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . a $50 signed first edition of Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.

Maguire is best known for his 1995 book Wicked, a revisionist telling of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Most of you probably know that it has also been made into a popular musical by the same title. Wicked is told, of course, not from Dorothy Gale's point of view, but from the view of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999) was Maguire's next novel and, in a similar vein, relates the Cinderella fairy tale not from Cinderella's point of view, but from the views of her two maligned stepsisters, plain-faced Iris and mentally handicapped Ruth. Très original!

Our particular copy of this book is in very good condition, with glossy, illustrated boards (not pictured) and a pristine interior. You might notice that is has been inscribed to a previous owner, as many used books often are. Babbitt's Books has devised a solution to this in the form of a bookplate, which we hope will go on sale soon. Written by Kathleen Kirk, the text of the bookplate is as follows:

Whose book this is, I think I know.
I don’t mind the inscription, though,
To someone else, for now it’s mine;
A book in the hand’s worth two in the snow.

Couldn't have said it better myself. 


If you'd like to give someone the gift of Gregory Maguire this Christmas but don't think $50 is in your price range, we also have a first edition, hardcover copy of Son of a Witch (the follow-up to Wicked) for only $6 and a paperback copy of Confessions for $4.

Oh, what a world! What a world! That such good books are available so inexpensively.

Title: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Publisher: ReganBooks

Year: 1990

Features: Signed, First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $50

Title: Son of a Witch

Publisher: ReganBooks

Year: 2005

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $6

On the 19th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . a nice collection of books by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

First up is the restored edition of Ariel, Plath's most famous collection of poetry. The first edition of Ariel, published two years after Plath's suicide in 1965, was edited and arranged by her estranged husband Ted Hughes, who diverged quite a bit from her original manuscript, adding in more than a dozen new poems and excising a dozen others entirely. This edition, which has a foreword by the couple's only surviving child, Frieda Hughes (Nicholas Farrar Hughes committed suicide in early 2009), preserves Plath's own arrangement. It also includes a facsimile of her manuscript, with both hand-written and typewritten poems. Still, Plath and Hughes had the habit of reading each other's work, and some critics argue that Plath would have approved of Hughes's edits. Did Hughes do his wife a favor by accentuating her better, bolder poems and cutting the weaker ones? Frieda Hughes says it best in her foreword.


"When she died leaving Ariel as her last book, she was caught in the act of revenge, in a voice that had been honed and practiced for years, latterly with the help of my father. Though he became a victim of it, ultimately he did not shy away from its mastery. 
This new, restored edition is my mother in that moment. It is the basis for the published Ariel, edited by my father. Each version has its own significance though the two histories are one."


Next up is the first American edition of Hughes's Wolfwatching, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1991. It is one of the last books of poetry published before Hughes's death from cancer in 1998, and explores man's interaction with the natural world.

Third in line is a lovely-looking collection titled Selected Poems: 1957-1994. This anthology draws from four decades of Hughes's work, and is as close as you will get to a definitive collection of the former Poet Laureate's work, as it was personally compiled by him when it was originally published in 1995. This copy you see here is a clean, new-looking reprint from 2002. 

Lastly, for those who want to read more about Plath's and Hughes's acrimonious marriage, we have a hardcover, jacketed copy of Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage. You get to learn what annoyed Plath about Hughes (his "scratching, nose-picking, with unwashed, unkempt hair & dogmatic grumpiness--all unnecessary & unpleasant" [99] is apparently part of it) and vice versa (Plath's anxiety, sexual jealousy, sentimentality, etc.). Perhaps each of them had a point. Hughes ultimately left Plath for poet Assia Wevill, whom he also cheated on, but Plath's bipolar depression must have been hard to live with.

In addition to the four books pictured above, we also have a hardcover, jacketed copy of Hughes's Birthday Letters, a book of poems about his late wife that brought wide acclaim shortly after his death--just as, ironically, the posthumously-published Ariel brought Plath her biggest fame. Love them or hate them, these two late poets are forever destined to be linked. 

Title: Ariel: The Restored Edition

Publisher: HarperCollins

Year: 2004

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $20

Title: Wolfwatching

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Year: 1991

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $25

Title: Selected Poems: 1957-1994

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

Year: 2002

Features: First FSG Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $10

Title: Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage

Publisher: Viking

Year: 2003

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

On the 20th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . Christmas books. Lots and lots of Christmas books. 

At the moment, we have two large wooden bins in the store to fit all of your Christmas needs. There are picture books for the kids, old sheet music for decorating, antique cards, and small, vintage volumes of lesser-known holiday stories (like Washington Irving's Old Christmas). There are also two lonely copies of Happening Hanukkah, a children's book of crafts and games. (Alas! I wanted to do at least one Hanukkah entry, but this is all that we have in stock. Sorry to disappoint, Jewish readers.) 


Among the items you can find in these festive bins are:


1. Two hardcover, jacketed first printings of Charles M. Schulz's A Charlie Brown Christmas.

2. A somewhat psychedelic-looking, Art Deco copy of Is There A Santa Claus? Some of you may not know the story behind this item, so here's a brief summary. In 1897, a little girl wrote an editorial to The Sun, a now-defunct New York newspaper, asking whether Santa Claus existed, as some of her friends had recently placed doubt in her mind. Editor Francis Pharcellus Church (a former Civil War war correspondent!) penned a touching and now famous response, assuring her that her "little friends" were wrong. Without faith in Santa Claus, he said, "[t]here would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence."

3. A hardcover, jacketed copy of A Visit from St. Nicholas (Twas The Night Before Christmas) by Clement M. Moore. Contains Moore's original text and accompanying annotations, a history of the poem, a reproduction of a copy hand-written by Moore, and a certificate of authenticity from the publisher. 

4. Vintage Christmas cards, most from 1910-1930, all priced at $1 or $2. They're great re-purposed as new Christmas cards or used as accents for a scrapbook. Here are a couple (one with its original envelope). 

Please keep in mind, too, that this is only a small sample of what we have right now. There are several copies of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, three $4 copies of A Christmas Carol, books of Christmas carols, and vintage Christmas postcards galore (located in a box beneath one of the wooden bins).


Come in and stock up for the season!

Title: A Charlie Brown Christmas (adapted from a Bill Melendez production)

Publisher: The World Publishing Company

Year: 1965

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $25

Title: Is There A Santa Claus: A Great Editor's Answer to A Little Girl's Question

Publisher: Buckbee-Brehm Co.

Year: 1927

Features: Hardcover

Condition: Good+

Price: $15

Title: A Visit from St. Nicholas (Twas The Night Before Christmas)

Publisher: International Resourcing Services, Inc. 

Year: 1997

Features: Hardcover, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

On the 21st day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . a signed, first edition of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Whether they're buying from us or selling to us, a common mistake that people make is assuming that signed books are automatically valuable / expensive.  As in, worth $200 or $300 . . . or more. Of course, as evidenced by yesterday's $35 signed Sandburg, that isn't always the case. A signed book's value is based on a number of factors, including supply, demand, condition, edition, and scarcity. If you want J.D. Salinger's signature, be prepared to shell out at least $7,500; he rarely signed anything, unless it was to a friend. By the same token, you can buy a book signed by Toni Morrison for under $25, as she signs liberally. 


Tonight's book is a good buy all around. It's a first edition in the original dust jacket, which means that you get the book as it first appeared. A book doesn't get earlier or more authentic than a first edition. The condition is also agreeable. There's a smudge or two to the book itself, a couple small tears to the dust jacket, but no extremely compromising defects. Plus the book is signed on the blank front endpaper by William Styron. No flourishes, no frills. Just a plain signature and lots of empty space for you to add a gift inscription, if you're so inclined.

The book is a fictional account of the life of Nat Turner, and was controversial at the time of publication for its sexually explicit content, as well as the fact that it was written from a black man's perspective by a white author. Did I happen to mention that this book won a Pulitzer Prize? That it's William Styron's best-known book? That it's only $50? 


If you're looking for something a little cheaper ($8), we also have a first edition of William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, an account of the author's plunge into severe depression in the mid-1980s. "Our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to," he writes, "has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness" (46-47). The book certainly deals with difficult subject matter, but it is also comforting to have someone put precise words, gorgeous words, to this often stigmatized disorder. 

Styron may not write the most happy-go-lucky books, but there's a reason he won a Pulitzer Prize: he's damn good. So if you're looking for a nice, modern signed first at an affordable price, look no further than Babbitt's Books.

Title: The Confessions of Nat Turner

Publisher: Random House

Year: 1967

Features: Signed, First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $50

Title: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

Publisher: Random House

Year: 1990

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $8

On the 22nd day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

. . . a $35 copy of Always The Young Strangers, signed by Carl Sandburg. 

Those of you not familiar with Sandburg's oeuvre will know him vaguely as a Chicago poet, but his prolificacy extended beyond verse. He won one of his three Pulitizer Prizes for a multi-volume biography of fellow Illinois resident, Abraham Lincoln. The American fairy tales that he dreamed up for his three young daughters were collected in a 1922 anthology called Rootabaga Stories. Folk music fascinated him, and long before he ever published any poetry, he taught himself guitar and played popular folk songs to an eager audience.

Always The Young Strangers is the account of his life, from his childhood in Galesburg, Illinois to his enlistment in the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish-American War. (He never saw combat, in case you are curious.) Sandburg has signed the book on the half-title page with a felt-tipped pen and dated the signature 1953. The name that appears above the date is the previous owner's. Her bookplate is on the verso of the front blank flyleaf, but it can probably be removed with care. There's even a tiny smudge near the 'g' in Sandburg's last name; perhaps a smudge from the great author himself? 

The endpapers of the book are illustrated with photographs of a young Sandburg and his parents. Galesburg figures heavily in this book: Chapter 2. is titled "The House on Berrien Street", Chapter 7. "Along Berrien Street", and Chapter 14. "Prairie Town."

Says Sandburg in Chapter 14., "This small town of Galesburg, as I look back at it, was a piece of the American Republic. Breeds and blood strains [stains?] that figure in history were there for me, as a boy, to see and hear in their faces and their ways of talking and acting" (280). 

This childhood home on Berrien Street has been turned into a museum, the Carl Sandburg Historic Site Association. The house is unimaginably tiny, a veritable doll's cottage. It is boggling to imagine Sandburg, his parents, and six siblings squeezed inside. Unfortunately, I visited in late 2008, when then-governor Rod Blagojevich had shut down Sandburg's childhood home and numerous other historic sites across Illinois, so I could only peer in the windows of the house and walk through the yard, where the ashes of Sandburg, his wife Lillian, and two of his daughters are buried. If you're a fan of Sandburg, a holiday jaunt up to Galesburg with your family and friends might be in order. 

Sorry for the small cell-phone picture, but holy cow! I'm sitting on the doorstep of Carl Sandburg's childhood home!

The only other thing I'd like to say about this book is that I've just managed to sell myself on it, so you'd better grab it before I do.

Title: Always The Young Strangers

Author: Carl Sandburg

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company

Year: 1953

Features: Signed, Presumed First Edition

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $35