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WingraBooks


Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx





FEATURED BOOKS: WingraBooks is featuring Hard-to-Find and Collectible Donald Hall Books.

Donald Hall was more than just a poet. He was a prolific writer, editor, and critic, known for his diverse body of work including poetry, memoirs, essays, children's literature, and even books about baseball. He also served as a professor, editor of the Paris Review, and the U.S. Poet Laureate. Treat yourself or someone else to one of his books.


The Bone Ring: Story Line Press, 1987, hardcover. SIGNED by author on title page. Like New hardcover in Very Good dust jacket. DJ is faded along spine. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. The original verse play in one long act is based on the authors memoir, String Too Short To Be Saved, originally published by The Viking Press in 1961. The play recaptures a child's life on his grandparents' New Hampshire farm in the late forties." 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 54 pp. $17.95

Here at Eagle Pond: Ticknor & Fields, 1990, hardcover. SIGNED by author on title page. First edition, first printing. Like New hardcover in Very Good- slipcase. Slipcase has two discolored spots and is sunned at extremities. A companion to Seasons at Eagle Pond , these witty and perceptive essays capture the essence of New England, past and present. From his ancestral home in Wilmot, N.H., poet Hall reminisces about his childhood, family history and the pleasures of country life. In Rusticus he discusses rural culture and its independence, conservatism and sense of continuity. How do New Hampshire citizens feel about their presidential primary? See Living Room Politics. Hall takes jabs at neighboring Vermont; he ruminates on the weather--the seasons are maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox and winter--and draws a composite picture of the countryfolk.--Publishers Weekly. B&W illustrations by Thomas W. Nason. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 141 pp. $40.00

The Ideal Bakery: North Point Press, 1987, hardcover. First edition, first printing. Like New hardcover in Very Good+ dust jacket. Spine of dj has lightly faded from green to blue. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. The Ideal Bakery is Donald Hall's first collection of short stories, written over twenty-five years. . . Best known for his poetry and essays, Hall writes stories that gather power from repeated thematic images, like his poems, and from the intensity of descriptive language, like his essays.--from the dj. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 137 pp. $25 includes shipping


Life Work: Beacon Press, 1993, hardcover. 2nd printing. SIGNED by the author on title page. Like New hardcover in Very Good dust jacket. Fading on dj spine. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. Hall has given us affectionate portraits of his New Hampshire cal in 'String Too Short to Be Saved,' the 'Eagle Pond' books. . .In 'Life Work,' we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family's lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both is obsession with work and its ultimate consolation.--from the dj. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 124 pp. $20.00

The Museum of Clear Ideas: New Poems Ticknor & Fields, 1993, hardcover. SIGNED by author on title page. First edition, first printing. Like New hardcover in Very Good+ dust jacket. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. Hall's 11th book of poetry is a brilliantly inventive tour de force that opens with an elegy to a fictitious poet whose life was devoted to tapping at blocks of the language. But most of the book is taken up by two long poems. The first, Baseball, allows Hall to adopt the persona of Mudville's K.C., who ruminates about the relationship between art and baseball, pitcher and poet. The poem is divided into nine innings or sections, each containing nine stanzas, with nine lines per stanza and nine syllables per line. This concern with craft surfaces in the other long poem, a kind of Horatian ars poetica for the 1990s entitled The Museum of Clear Ideas. In this witty little masterpiece, Hall becomes old Horsecollar with Bic pen in hand, lamenting the complications of modern life, especially sexual ones enacted by characters with names like Flaccus and Sabina. Even the art of poetry has been destroyed by an army of McPoets. A significant and engaging book that belongs in all larger libraries. - Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill. in Library Journal 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 120 pp. $65 includes shipping

Old and New Poems: Ticknor & Fields, 1990, hardcover. SIGNED by author on title page. First edition, first printing. Like New hardcover in VG+ dust jacket. DJ is faded on spine. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. Book includes nearly two hundred poems, written between 1947 and 1990. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 244 pp. $40 includes shipping


The Painted Bed: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, hardcover. First edition, first printing. SIGNED by author on title page. Like New hardcover in Like New dust jacket. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his 'Without' (1998), but from the distance of passed time.--from the dj. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 87 pp. $40 includes shipping

Seasons at Eagle Pond: Ticknor & Fields, 1987, hardcover. First edition, first printing. VG+ hardcover in VG+ slipcover. Slight fading to spine. One very tiny discolored spot on frontispiece. In celebration of New England and the seasons, the poet laureate of New Hampshire records his love of place. The place is a 180-year-old farmland, Eagle Pond, the home of Hall's grandparents and now his home. 'There's no reason to live here except for love,' writes Hall as he describes the sight of huge Holsteins frolicking or, when impatient for the arrival of spring, he suggests pushing winter 'off to a condominium in the keys of Antarctica.' This collection of four essays by a close observer of the natural world is a blend of reminiscences, anecdotes and vignettes that capture continuity of family and the quiet delights of rural life in each season.--Publishers Weekly. B&W woodcut illustrations by Thomas W. Nason. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 86 pp. $36

The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts Ticknor & Fields, 1988, hardcover. SIGNED by author on title page. First edition, first printing. Like New hardcover in Good+ dust jacket. DJ is rubbed on edges. Some fading to back panel. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. This book-length poem, divided into three parts, sets on the page, for the eye and ear to absorb, some of the harrowing rigors of contemporary life, always viewed as a product of what has gone before--both psychically and historically, inside and outside.--from the dj. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 67 pp. $70 includes shipping


The Unsayable Said: Copper Canyon Press, stapled pamphlet, 1993. SIGNED on title page. Like New condition. Pamphlet is stored in an archival polyethylene bag. This is an essay on poetry by Donald Hall produced in celebration of twenty years of publishing poetry at Copper Canyon Press. 16mo--approx. 6 - 7 tall. 9 pp. $24 includes shipping

Without: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, hardcover. First edition, first printing. Like New hardcover in Like New dust jacket. DJ is in a protective and removable mylar cover. 'Without' is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement--his gift and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.--from the dj. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 81 pp. $32 includefs shipping

KICKING THE LEAVES: Harper & Row, 1978, softcover. SIGNED by Hall on title page. 3rd printing. VG++ condition. Ever-so-slight fading near spine. Book is stored in an archival polyethylene bag. The publication of 'Kicking the Leaves'. . .have brought Hall to the forefront of poetic attention.--from the cover. 8vo – 7 3/4 to 9 1/2 tall. 58 pp. $29 includes shipping