The Rose Books & Obscurities

12/24/2025

Thank you Monterey Herald and Kari for stopping by and taking the time.

For a storefront that may appear fantastical, The Rose Books & Obscurities is very much grounded in practicality. “I don’t romanticize it,” says Rose.

11/06/2025

We are pleased to share a newly released category with a wide variety of works on Architecture.

This past summer, we acquired a remarkable private collection devoted to architecture, featuring a wide range of significant works spanning modernism, theory, and the avant-garde. Most copies are in Near Fine to Fine condition. We’ve now begun adding select titles to our website with more to follow in the coming weeks.

Highlights include works by Christopher Alexander, Manfredo Tafuri, and Frei Otto, along with volumes on Bauhaus and Constructivist design, postwar modernism, and mid-century architectural philosophy. Recent additions such as The Linz Café, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, and Tensile Structures reflect the diversity and depth of this group.

We invite you to browse the growing selection online and check back often as new titles are added.

10/27/2024

08/24/2024

The Second World War (In Publisher's Original Wooden box) by Sir Winston Churchill

Publishing: 1948-1953: Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston First American Edition.

A set of Churchill’s monumental work in the rare publishers wooden box. First printing of the books. Dust jackets with the original price of $6.00 still present (only The Gathering Storm has been price clipped) Dates are included on the title page of each volume, as called for.

The set is up for bid. Additional notes on my eBay listing. Link is in the comment section and directly linked to the photo.

06/18/2024

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Publishing: 1882 Rees Welsh & Co; Philadelphia Association Copy

An early edition of Walt Whitmans monumental work and one of the greatest masterpieces of American literature. The present edition is the reprint utilizing slightly altered plates from the 1881-82 "Suppressed Edition printed in Boston months prior. What is most interesting is the association on the front free endpaper.

Provenance: this copy is inscribed by Justus H. Schwab to Dyer D. Lum. Both were major figures in the American anarchist movement in the early 1800's. Schwab immigrated into the United States in 1868 where he operated a radical saloon in New York City's Lower East Side (50 East 1st Street). It was advertised as "the gathering-place for all bold, joyful, and freedom-loving spirits". The saloon became an epicenter for social radicalism and was frequented by anarchist Schwabs close friends, Emma Goldman, writers Ambrose Bierce, and Walt Whitman.

" In 1893 when she [Emma Goldman] was twenty four, she was convicted of unlawful assembly and incitement to riot and then spent 10 months in New York's Blackwell island prison. There she received from her friend Justus Schwab, stacks of books by "Walt Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Spencer, John Stewart Mill and many other English American authors I learned to know and love." (Living My Life, 145)

Schwab contributed significantly to the reputation of the Lower East Side and present-day East Village as a center of transformative social and political movements.

Dyer lum to whom the book was presented is best remembered as the lover and mentor of early anarchy-femist Voltairine de Claire. In 1890 he wrote The Economics of Anarchy.

"Rent, interest, profit are the triple heads of the monster against which modern civilization is waging war." - Dyer Lum

Inquire

04/13/2024

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Publication: 1676 Printed for Peter Parker; London The Eight Edition corrected and Augmented by the Author

A complete early edition of this important and fascinating work of medicine and philosophy by Robert Burton written under the name Democritus Junior, first published in 1621. This was the final seventeenth century edition, the last to be printed until 1800. With the often missing engraved title page by Christoffel Le Bron, and the scarce final publisher's advertisement leaf, and retaining the original half title 'the argument of the frontispiece' to its verso. A medical textbook on the subject of melancholia, Burton's work is written in a noticeably satirical tone in places, using melancholy as a lens through which all human emotion and thought may be scrutinize. Although presented as a medical study, it has been viewed as a work of literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text.Burton's digressive style, often verging on the stream of consciousness, informs and animates the text.

Collated complete.

Condition: Very Good. Full condition report on website.