True History Elephant Man

Capps, Benjamin: The True Memoirs of Charley Blankenship - A Novel, Philadelphia, PA J.B. Lippincott Company 1972
ISBN: 0-397-00760-4 Near Fine in Near Fine DJ Dust Jacket Design By Isa Barnett

252pp. Blue half-cloth, blue paper boards, silver gilt spine lettering, deckled fore-edge. Dust jacket price 5.95. SIGNED BY AUTHOR to half-title page. Minor bumping to top corners o/w book appears in tight, unread condition; dust jacket has minor rubbing to front panel, slight shelfwear but still very bright, crisp and fully intact. Signed copies of this book are scarce. Benjamin Capps was one of the best American writers of the 20th-century. After an impoverished youth in Archer County, Texas during the Depression and after navigating forty bombing missions in a B-24 in the Pacific during World War II, he settled down in Grand Prairie, Texas to raise a family and write. In all, he wrote 9 novels, a book of short stories, and 3 works of non-fiction. Five of his novels ['The Trail to Ogallala', 'Sam Chance', 'Woman Chief', 'A Woman of the People', 'The White Man's Road'] are great works of fiction, and yet he is almost unknown. Why? Because he [like another great Texas author, Elmer Kelton] took as his canvas the nineteenth-century West, at a time when that subject was falling in popularity. In addition, Capps did not write 'Westerns' [except for his first paperback-only novel]. He wrote psychologically acute, realistically accurate historical novels about trail rides, ranching life in West Texas, 19th-century utopian communities, and the life of the Plains Indians. " The emphasis on characterization, historical background, and folklore makes these works perceptive studies of plausible characters in situations that demanded much of them physically and psychologically. This material is the basis of good fiction, regardless of the setting.....Capps is an anomaly - a writer of quality or serious fiction set in the West. Had he written of similar conflicts east of the Mississippi, he might have been known as one of the great novelists in the United States rather than as a Western writer, a label that some feel suggests a writer of inferior quality". - Lawrence Clayton. His seventh novel is a "...free-wheeling, high-spirited novel...the story of a young man who goes West in search of freedom, romance, and excitement. When seventeen-year-old Charley Blankenship suddenly 'gets an itch and can't find a place to scratch', he runs away from home. He vows not to return to Missouri until he owns a horse and a thousand dollars, and he travels far and wide, with adventures rolling his way like tumble-weed....[this novel] is an authentic pictures of the West in the 1880's by Benjamin Capps, a writer who is steeped in its history and folklore ."- front flap. "...in the open-ended picaresque tradition of Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'...the protagonist is very much the picaro [as] he wanders around the American West from 1880 to 1890 in close contact with a representative melange of particularly well-drawn frontier character types who provide interesting adventures during the latter days of the open-range frontier. Charley's efforts to find his brother, Buck, are at least as much as his own effort to 'see the elephant and listen to the hoot owl prowl'. The bildungsroman element in the tale is obvious, for this is Blankenship's growing into awareness. At the end of the narrative he says that he 'would not give back a single bruise I got wandering around in the West.'...The Narrative is smoothly executed with ample humor, action, and characterization, Blankenship is certainly one of Capps's most interesting figures, even if he is naive throughout most of the adventures. The history, folk elements, and representative activities mark this as an outstanding historical novel." - Lawrence Clayton. Signed by Author First Edition Near Fine Hard Cover 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall

[SW: TEXAS AUTHOR WESTERN FICTION FIRST EDITIONS]

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Howell, Michael & Ford, Peter: The True History of the Elephant Man, Allison & Busby 1980
Fine

FINE/VG+ 2ND IMPRESSION/1ST ED A&B HARDBACK, WITH ORIGINAL UNCLIPPED DJ AND QUALITY RARE PHOTO PLATES. PUBLISHED IN 1980 AND ONE OF THE MOST COMPELLING STUDIES OF THE ELEPHANT MAN, GIVING A MEDICAL BASIS TO THE ACCOUNT WHICH AVOIDS SENSATIONALISM. ALSO A DETAILED PICTURE OF VICTORIAN LIFE, MAKING THE BOOK AS MOVING AND CLEAR-SIGHTED AS THE FILM OF THE SAME YEAR. IMMEDIATE DISPATCH WORLDWIDE First Thus Very Good Hardback

[SW: David Lynch Medical History FreaksHistory]

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Howell, Michael & Peter Ford. THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE ELEPHANT MAN. Allison & Busby: 1980
ISBN: 0-85031-353-8 Fine-

190 pages + Index, illustrated. "Joseph Merrick was a nineteenth-century cripple who became the msot famous "professional freak" in history. This book, by a doctor-and-writer team, is thoroughly researched, medically and hsitorically, from public files and private attics." FINE - HARDCOVER, with some pencil lines in margins of text, very good hardcover. Very Good Hard Cover 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall

[SW: Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, Frederick Treves, Neurofibromatosis, Ethics, Paitents]

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Howell, Michael; Ford, Peter: The True History of the Elephant Man, United Kingdom Allison & Busby 1980
ISBN: 0850313538 Very Good

190pp., 36 b/w illus. biblio. Minor bumping to spine, edgewear to unclipped dj. 'Traces Merrick's life from his humble birth in Leicester, through his mother's early death and his pathetic adolescent attempts at ordinary employment, to his search for refuge in the workhouse; from his escape into the freakshow circuits at the mercy of professional showmen, to his final sojourn at the London Hospital - wher he became a celebrity visited by the famous and the fashionable' First Edition Very Good Black Cloth 8vo

[SW: Biography Medicine History]

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