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Brickbat will close today, Saturday, at 6pm.

We will re-open on Tues, Jan. 3rd, at 11am.

Happy New Year!

Featured: Last Minute Gift Ideas: Classic Children's Books

Brickbat will be open tomorrow, December 24th, 11am to 3pm.Here are a few gift ideas for the panic-stricken out there.



Struwwelpeter: Or Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures
Hardcover

Pauline knew not to play with matches, Philip's parents told him not to fidget, and Conrad was duly warned about the tailor who snips off thumbsuckers' thumbs--a morbidly hilarious, much-loved classic volume of cautionary verses In December 1844, Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, a German doctor, couldn't find a suitable book to give his three-year-old son as a Christmas present. Instead he bought a blank book and set out to write and draw what was to become his world-famous picture book. Hoffmann filled his book with dazzling and gruesome stories and pictures that he had invented to try to put his frightened young patients at their ease. After its publication in 1845, the book's popularity continued to grow and it has been published in thousands of editions throughout the world.




Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates
Hardcover

Wilde's second collection of fairy tales, originally published in 1891, following "The Happy Prince" in 1888. The volume includes "The Young King," "The Birthday of the Infanta," and "The Star-Child." While these stories are clearly intended for a younger audience, Wilde, with typical sardonic quip declared that the stories were "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."
A Calla Edition, originally published by Methuen and Co., Ltd., London, 1914.






William Timlin, The Ship That Sailed to Mars
Hardcover

A raison d'etre of Calla Editions is to make long-forgotten masterworks available to contemporary bibliophiles, and this book fulfills that aim like few others can. The Ship That Sailed to Mars has a legendary reputation, and the original edition is much sought after by an ardent cult of collectors. Its author, William Timlin, was an obscure South African architect who, in a singular burst of creativity, brought forth a magical intertwining of science fiction and fantasy, a kind of Burroughs meets Tolkien. With 48 pages of calligraphic text — in Timlin's hand — and 48 color plates, it is a work of stunning design, illustration, calligraphy, and overall conception. The Calla Edition also features a new introduction by John Howe, one of the two chief conceptual designers for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The reappearance of this much-discussed title will be applauded by many fans of science fiction, fantasy, and book illustration.
A Calla Edition, originally published by George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., London, 1923.





The Juniper Tree : And Other Tales from Grimm
Maurice Sendak, Randall Jarrell and Lore Segal
Hardcover

Originally published as a two-volume set thirty years ago, The Juniper Tree is distinguished first by the selection of stories. Lore Segal and Maurice Sendak have jointly culled 27 from the 210 in the complete collection, and their contents page presents a fascinating critical statement. The translations are another distinguishing quality of the Segal/Sendak edition. Both translators have been painstakingly faithful to the German texts; they have not cut, “retold,” or bowdlerized. In addition, Segal and Jarrell bring to their renderings of Grimm the grace and precision that are characteristic of their own original prose. This must-have edition for every home library is jacketed and cloth-bound and has a bookmark ribbon.





Robert Louis Stevenson & Charles Robinson, A Child's Garden of Verses
Hardcover

Generations of children have gone "up in a swing, up in the air so blue" and to "The Land of Counterpane" with these timeless verses by a beloved author. Master storyteller and poet Robert Louis Stevenson evokes the delights, fears, and wonders of childhood in a memorable series of images and rhymes.
In simple, expressive language, the poet ponders the mysteries of home and the wider world — the nightly dreams of "The Land of Nod," the curious rustle of "Auntie's Skirts," and encounters with the changing tide "At the Sea-side."
This keepsake edition features 100 enchanting pen-and-ink drawings by noted artist Charles Robinson. The playful exuberance of Robinson's Art Nouveau-style images provides a perfect complement to this enduring classic.
Reprint of the Charles Scribner's Sons, London, 1902 edition.







Arthur Quiller-Couch & Edmund Dulac, The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales
Hardcover

This sumptuous volume is a welcome follow-up to the earlier Calla publication of Dulac's Stories from Hans Christian Andersen. Edmund Dulac was second only to Arthur Rackham in his sensitivity to the world of fairy tales, and his style is at once exotic and elegant. The present edition contains four tales: "The Sleeping Beauty," "Blue Beard," "Cinderella," and "Beauty and the Beast" in artful retelling, but the main feature of the book is the generous offering of 30 full-page color plates in Dulac's inimitable style. Additional design elements make this Calla edition a keepsake for readers and collectors alike.
A Calla Edition, originally published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1910.

Featured: Four Hardbacks by Philip K. Dick

Ubik
Hardcover (BCE)





In Milton Lumky Territory
First Edition








Radio Free Albemuth




Mary And The Giant
First Edition




These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Four Covers

Claude Simon, The Palace
Cover by Sydney Butchkes
Hardcover




Gerhard Zwerenz, Little Peter In War And Peace
Cover by Kuhlman Associates
Hardcover




Joseph Kessel, Belle De Jour
Cover by William Metzig
Hardcover






Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth
Cover by Greta Eichelbaum
Hardcover




These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Five From Wakefield Press

Georges Perec, An Attempt At Exhausting A Place
Paperback

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the “infraordinary”: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—“what happens,” as he put it, “when nothing happens.” His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.




Pierre Louys, The Young Girl's Handbook Of Good Manners
Paperback

The first of Pierre Louÿs’s erotic works to see publication after his death, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is also his most outrageous, and one of the few erotic classics in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice and a parodic format, Louÿs turns late nineteenth-century manners roundly upon their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether he is offering rules for etiquette in church, school, or home, or outlining a girl’s duties toward family, neighbor, or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution, leaving no hypocrisy unexposed. The book has only grown more scandalous and subversive than when it first appeared in 1926.




Charles Fourier, The Hierarchies Of Cuckoldry
Paperback

In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce, Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy, and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the financial sector to screw over the public. Gathered together here for the first time are Fourier’s two “Hierarchies”—humorously regimented parades of civilization’s cheated and cheated-on in the domestic sphere of sex and the economic sphere of buying and selling commodities. “The Hierarchy of Cuckoldry”—translated into English for the first time—presents 72 species of the male cuckold, ranging from such “common class” cases as the Health-Conscious Cuckold to the Short-Horned Sympathetic, Optimist and Mystical Cuckolds, and the Long-Horned varieties of the Irate, Disgraced and Posthumous Cuckolds. For Fourier, these amount to 72 manifestations of women’s “secret insurrection” against the institution of marriage. “The Hierarchy of Bankruptcy” presents 36 species of the fraudulent bankrupt: a range of Light, Grandiose, and Contemptible shades of financial manipulators who force creditors, cities and even nations to bail them out of ultimately profitable bankruptcies. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier’s “Hierarchies” resonate uncannily with our contemporary world.




Benjamin Peret, The Leg Of Lamb
Paperback

A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret’s short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives that play on a medley of registers, employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations, and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of twenty-four delirious narratives, including the novella-length works … And the Breasts Were Dying… and There Was a Little Bakeress…. Péret’s adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke, or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid, or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer.

Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not just a highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist movement. Here, Péret’s unfettered imagination does not so much represent Surrealism as constitute it, and describes a world defined by childlike delight and aggression—a world in which metamorphosis is endless and death is dream.




Honore de Balzac, Treatise Of Elegant Living
Paperback

Honoré de Balzac’s 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire’s “The Dandy” (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: “Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose,” runs one classic definition of dandyism, and “The man of taste must always know how to reduce need to a minimum” asserts the role elegant living can play in times of both opulence and strife. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac’s Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac’s Human Comedy (which was originally to have included a never-completed four-part philosophical “Pathology of Social Life”). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.




These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Philip K. Dick Classic Paperbacks

Mr Bloodmoney

The Preserving Machine

Solar Lottery

Confessions Of A Crap Artist

Clans Of The Alphane Moon

The Word Jones Made (1st Edition)

The Word Jones Made

Eye In The Sky

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday