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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Annotated Lolita'
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fellowship of the Ring'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'
An absorbing mystery as well as a morality tale, the story of Pip, a poor village lad, and his expectations of wealth is Dickens at his most deliciously readable. The cast of characters includes kindly Joe Gargery, the loyal convict Abel Magwitch and the haunting Miss Havisham. If you have heartstrings, count on them being tugged. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets'
A fantastic mass market edition of the phenomenonally best-selling second Harry Potter novel, to tie in to the second Harry Potter filmHarry's second year at Hogwarts. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings'
This four volume, deluxe paperback boxed set contains J.R.R. Tolkien's epic masterworks THE HOBBIT and the three volumes of THE LORD OF THE RINGS (THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, THE TWO TOWERS, and THE RETURN OF THE KING) in their definitive text settings complete with maps and cover illustrations by the celebrated artist Alan Lee. In THE HOBBIT, Bilbo Baggins is whisked away from his comfortable, unambitious life in Hobbiton by the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves. He finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent. THE LORD OF THE RINGS tells of the great and dangerous quest undertaken by Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the dwarf; Legolas the elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. J.R.R. Tolkien's three volume masterpiece is at once a classic myth and a modern fairy tale -- a story of high and heroic adventure set in the unforgettable landscape of Middle-Earth. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Austen'
Collected together in one volume, The Complete Novels show the development of Austen as a writer and social commentator. From the early optimism and youthful energy of Northanger Abbey to the quiet and subtle art of Persuasion, this collection reveals the breadth of one of the best loved novelists of all time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lolita'
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lord of the Rings'
Let's face it--even some adults find Tolkien's mammoth fantasy a daunting mouthful but children now have this special seven-book box set of The Lord of The Rings to make the epic tale just that bit easier to chew on. Split into its seven constituent parts, these slim volumes tell the ageless tale of young Frodo's quest to destroy The Ring and defeat the forces of evil. It's beautifully presented in a black presentation box with the movie logo and an illustration on the side and the spines of the books also form the movie logo. A contemporary look and plenty of "cool appeal" will grab kids' interest and ensure they don't miss out on reading this classic of the genre. --Jonathan Weir [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lord of the Rings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lord of the Rings Book: With Bookends'
Presented here in hardcover with a beautiful jacket chosen through a global fan poll, J.R.R. Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, has been hailed throughout the world as one of the greatest adventure stories ever written. Millions of readers have celebrated this exciting tale of hobbits, wizards, men, dwarves, and elves in a land called Middle-earth. Now millions of filmgoers have embraced the blockbuster motion picture trilogy that has fired the imaginations of a new generation.
Returning to Hobbiton after an absence of many years, the wizard Gandalf quickly sought out Bag End, the home of his old and dear friend the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. It was the morning of Bilbo's one hundred and eleventh birthday, and a party of special magnificence was planned for that night. The old hobbit had been plagued by the incessant attentions of unwanted visitors, well-wishers, and distant relations, prompting him to hang out a sign on his front gate warning "No admittance except on party business." It was in this grumpy state of mind that Bilbo, completely unprepared for the joyous reunion that awaited him, stomped to the door to answer Gandalf's knock.
These unique, limited-edition bookend sculptures have been hand-cast in heavyweight polystone and hand-painted to the highest standards by the artists of Sideshow/Weta, a unique partnership between museum-quality collectibles manufacturer Sideshow, Inc. and Weta Workshop of New Zealand, the artisans responsible for the conceptualization, prosthetics, makeup effects, weapons, armor, and miniatures for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King/Two Towers/Fellowship of the Ring'
More editions of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King/Two Towers/Fellowship of the Ring:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King/Two Towers/Fellowship of the Ring'
A Christian can almost be forgiven for not reading the Bible, but there's no salvation for a fantasy fan who hasn't read the gospel of the genre, J.R.R. Tolkien's definitive three-book epic, the Lord of the Rings (encompassing The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King), and its charming precursor, The Hobbit. That many (if not most) fantasy works are in some way derivative of Tolkien is understood, but the influence of the Lord of the Rings is so universal that everybody from George Lucas to Led Zeppelin has appropriated it for one purpose or another.
Not just revolutionary because it was groundbreaking, the Lord of the Rings is timeless because it's the product of a truly top-shelf mind. Tolkien was a distinguished linguist and Oxford scholar of dead languages, with strong ideas about the importance of myth and story and a deep appreciation of nature. His epic, 10 years in the making, recounts the Great War of the Ring and the closing of Middle-Earth's Third Age, a time when magic begins to fade from the world and men rise to dominance. Tolkien carefully details this transition with tremendous skill and love, creating in the Lord of the Rings a universal and all-embracing tale, a justly celebrated classic. --Paul Hughes [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mansfield Park'
Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. In Mansfield Park, for example, Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the younger of the family's two sons.
Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted, and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed, Mansfield Park is rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But this is a comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people." What does not vary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Name of the Rose'
A 14th-century ex-Inquisitor investigates murder at a monastery and finds mysteries within mysteries. Eco's masterwork of literary genius is a fascinating and challenging read. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Return of the King'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'To the Lighthouse'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality.
Observed across the years at their vacation house facing the gales of the North Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. Though it is the death of Mrs. Ramsay on which the novel turns, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Virginia Woolfs great book enacts a powerful allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Two Towers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places'
From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian
For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.
Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
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