Secondhand Vintage Hardbacks Bargain Book Box SP4009

Secondhand Vintage Hardbacks Bargain Book Box SP4009

Eighteen hardbacks in dust jackets from the 1950s and 1960s — John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, Daphne du Maurier’s The Glass-Blowers, Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower, Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso, and more. A collector’s box of mid-century Book Club and early editions. Please note these are secondhand copies in vintage condition and the books may show wear.

1. The Shoes of the Fisherman — Morris West — A Ukrainian archbishop is released from a Soviet labour camp and rises unexpectedly to the papacy; West’s 1963 novel anticipated a Polish pope sixteen years before John Paul II. A bestseller of remarkable prescience.
2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — John le Carré — The novel that established le Carré as the definitive writer of Cold War espionage; Alec Leamas is sent on one final mission across the Berlin Wall. Published 1963. One of the twentieth century’s great novels.
3. Cooper’s Creek — Alan Moorehead — The definitive account of the doomed Burke and Wills expedition across Australia; Moorehead writes history with the pace of a thriller. A landmark of Australian non-fiction.
4. Explaining the Atom — Selig Hecht & Eugene Rabinowitch — A 1950s popular science account of nuclear physics and atomic energy by two scientists; a period document of how science was communicated to the public in the atomic age.
5. The Glass-Blowers — Daphne du Maurier — Du Maurier’s 1963 novel about her Huguenot ancestors, glassmakers driven from France by religious persecution; quieter than Rebecca or Jamaica Inn, but deeply felt. Based on meticulous research.
6. Cry the Beloved Country — Alan Paton — Paton’s 1948 novel about a Black South African priest who travels to Johannesburg to find his son and discovers the true costs of apartheid. One of the most important political novels of the twentieth century.
7. The Watch Tower — Elizabeth Harrower — Harrower’s devastating 1966 novel, in which two sisters become trapped in the orbit of a manipulative and dangerous man in postwar Sydney. Rediscovered in the 2010s as one of Australian literature’s essential works.
8. The Prize — Irving Wallace — A group of Nobel Prize recipients travel to Stockholm and find their professional and personal lives disrupted by the week’s events; Wallace’s 1962 bestseller is meticulously researched and compulsively plotted.
9. Dynasty — Tony Morphett — The Australian novel and television tie-in following a family’s rise through the political and social structures of twentieth-century Australia; an important document in Australian popular fiction.
10. Life with Picasso — Françoise Gilot & Carlton Lake — Gilot’s memoir of her decade as Picasso’s companion, written with Carlton Lake; one of the most frank and intelligent accounts of living with genius ever published. Picasso attempted to suppress it.
11. The Second Lady — Irving Wallace — The Soviet Union replaces the American First Lady with a double in Wallace’s 1980 political thriller; a premise that generates extraordinary tension in the hands of a supremely skilled popular novelist.
12. The Long Walk — Slavomir Rawicz — The account of Rawicz’s escape from a Siberian labour camp in 1941 and his 4,000-mile walk to freedom through Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas. One of the great survival narratives.
13. The Age of Chivalry — Arthur Bryant — Bryant’s account of mediaeval England and the chivalric code that shaped it; richly researched popular history from one of the most celebrated British historians of the mid-twentieth century.
14. The Mottled Lizard — Elspeth Huxley — The sequel to The Flame Trees of Thika; Huxley’s memoir of growing up in East Africa, continuing through her teenage years in England and return to Kenya. Beautifully written colonial memoir.
15. A Pattern of Islands — Arthur Grimble — Grimble’s classic 1952 memoir of his years as a colonial administrator in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands; witty, generous, and full of extraordinary anthropological observation.
16. The Tontine — Thomas B. Costain — A sprawling historical novel following a tontine — a financial arrangement between many survivors — from its formation after Waterloo through to the Victorian era as the survivors dwindle. Costain at his most ambitious.
17. The Women’s Room — Marilyn French — French’s 1977 feminist landmark, following a woman’s journey from housewife to Harvard and the full reckoning of what that journey costs. One of the most important American novels of the 1970s.
18. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita — Rumer Godden — A woman leaves her husband and children for an Italian filmmaker; her children’s arrival to reclaim her sets up the moral struggle at the centre of this Godden novel. Characteristically precise and unsentimental.