We are open: Monday to Saturday 9.30 am to 5.30 pm
We are CLOSED Sunday 26th August 2024
OPEN Monday 27th August 10.00 am to 4.00 pm
TO ORDER BOOKS RING 020 8940 1802 EMAIL: theopenbook@theopenbookrichmond.co.uk
We are on Twitter @theopenbook2 (but don't order via there).
How To Be Invisible - UK 1st signed by Kate Bush
​
Price: £1000.00
Selected and arranged by the author, and with a new introduction by novelist David Mitchell, How To Be Invisible presents the lyrics of Kate Bush for the first time in a beautiful cloth-bound Faber edition. 'For millions around the world, Kate is way more than another singer-songwriter: she is a creator of musical companions that travel with you through life. One paradox about Kate is that while her lyrics are proudly idiosyncratic, those same lyrics evoke emotions and sensations that feel universal.
Literature works in similar mysterious ways. Kate's the opposite of a confessional singer-songwriter ... You don't learn much about Kate from her songs.
She's fond of masks and costumes - lyrically and literally - and of yarns, fabulations and atypical narrative viewpoints. Yet, these fiercely singular songs, which nobody else could have authored, are also maps of the heart, the psyche, the imagination. In other words, art.' David Mitchell
​
​
Extinct Boids by Ralph Steadman Signed Limited of 150 w/ Print New in Box
​
Price:£750
When Ceri Levy asked Ralph Steadman to produce one piece of art representing an extinct bird for a recent exhibition, Ghosts of Gone Birds, Ralph said 'yes'. Then 'yes' again ... and again ...
and again. An astonishing 100 paintings later, Extinct Boids was born. Ralph got carried away by the birds, taking Ceri with him ...
this book details the discoveries they made on their travels through the savage seas of extinction. After stumbling on the previously hidden Toadstool Island, where the extinct birds of the world live on in secretive harmony, the duo spent nearly a year in close proximity to a host of fantastical avian creatures. Ralph documents them all in this series of remarkable paintings, featuring unique interpretations of well-known birds such as the Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon and Dodo, along with less familiar members of the feathersome firmament - Snail-eating Coua, for example, or the Red-moustached Fruit Dove - and a variety of bizarre beasts including the Gob Swallow, the Long-legged Shortwing and the Needless Smut.
All are captured in a riot of expression and colour, with a slice of trademark Steadman humour. Strictly limited to just 150 copies, this Special Edition is an ultra-deluxe version of the book, bound with real cloth and signed by Ralph and Ceri. It is in a cloth-bound presentation box, and comes complete with a signed, numbered A3 giclee print with torn edge and debossed border, featuring Steadman's interpretation of the Black Mamo.
This print, produced specially for this book, makes this boxed set the ultimate collector's edition.
District and Circle by Seamus Heaney Signed First Edition
​
Price: £200
Seamus Heaney's collection starts 'in an age of bare hands and cast iron' and ends 'as the automatic lock / clunks shut' in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the 'heavyweight silence' of cattle out in rain - are coloured by a strongly contemporary sense that 'anything can happen', and other images from the dangerous present - a journey on the underground, a melting glacier - are fraught with this same anxiety.
But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like 'The Tollund Man in Springtime' and in several poems which 'do the rounds of the district' - its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts - the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals:Again the growl / Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble / Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal / Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.
Human Chain Signed First Edition Clothbound
Price: £820
​
A lovely first edition/first printing, limited to 325 copies (twenty-five copies with Roman numerals were issued for the author, not for sale) in Very Fine condition in alike, original slip-case. SIGNED and numbered 49 by author Seamus Heaney on the limitation page; The Irish Nobel laureate's 14th collection of verse, a book of shades and memories, of things whispered, of journeys into the underworld, of elegies and translations, of echoes and silences Limited/Numbered Edition; First Printing; Signed by Author.
Seamus Heaney's collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other 'hermit songs' which weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar.
A remarkable sequence entitled 'Route 110' plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s adolescence to the birth of the poet's first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead - friends, neighbours and family - which is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain is Seamus Heaney's twelfth collection of poems.
