Add this copy of The World Mine Oyster: the Memoirs to cart. $160.83, very good condition, Sold by Burwood Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Wickham Market, SUFFOLK, UNITED KINGDOM, published 1961 by Heinemann.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
First Edition In English. Hardback. 8vo. pp xxi, 330. Original publishers purple cloth, lettered silver at spine. Frontis portrait, illustrations. Nice copy in clean jacket, bookplate of serious book collector Kenneth Clements on pastedown, on the final 2 blanks at rear he has written out a well researched chronology of Ghyjka's life, giving his address in Roscommon in Ireland; very neatly done. Very good in very good dust jacket.
Add this copy of World Mine Oyster, the to cart. $238.34, good condition, Sold by Lisa Van Munster rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Oshawa, ON, CANADA, published 1961 by William Heinemann Ltd.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Lacey Everett. Good in Good jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. SELLER'S NOTE TO INTERNATIONAL (NON CANADA OR USA) BUYERS: Additional shipping charges will be required and requested during the purchase process of this title. BOOK: Corners, Spine Bumped; Moderate Shelf Rub to Boards; Spine Slightly Cocked; Edges Lightly Soiled; Heavy Yellowing Due to Age. DUST JACKET: Previous Owner Markings (Price Clipped); Lightly Creased; Moderately Chipped; Slight Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. SUB-TITLE: The Memoirs of Matila Ghyka, K.C.V.O., M.C. ALSO KNOWN AS: The World Mine Oyster is the considerably shortened and adapted version of my two volumes Escales de ma Jeunesse and Heureux qui comme Ulysse, which were originally published in Paris by La Colombe, and which were "crowned" by the "Academie Francaise." I am most grateful to Mr Patrick Leigh Fermor and Mr Benjamin Glazebrook for help in adapting my translation from the French. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY: Patrick Leigh Fermor. CONTENTS: I My Moldavian Childhood; II A Schoolboy in Paris; III On the Borda; IV The Iphigenie's Last Cruise; V The Black Sea and the Danube; VI Love and Higher Mathematics; VII Back to the Rumanian Navy; VIII A Mission to the Shah; IX Up the Rhine and Down the Danube; X I Go Round the World; XI The First World War; XII On A Russian Battleship; XIII The War Continues; XIV Diplomatic Interludes; XV Rumania Under King Carol; XVI Professor of Aesthetics; Index. SYNOPSIS: In his Introduction to the English edition of these remarkable memoirs, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes: "Even before the war the world from which Matila Ghyka springs seemed fabulously remote. Now that it has been irretrievably destroyed and its ruins sealed away behind hostile political barriers, it has retreated a further giant stride into distance and legend." The author's great-grandfather, Gregory Ghyka X, was the last reigning Prince of Moldavia before this principality was united with its sister state Wallachia in 1859, to form what ultimately became the kingdom of Rumania. Gregory Ghyka X had been crowned in Yassy, and it was here in 1881 that the author was born. Educated first in Paris, then with Jesuit priests in Jersey, he joined the French Naval Academy on the Borda at the age of sixteen. But although the sea was his original calling, an insatiable curiosity about every facet of life led him thereafter into the most diverse spheres. It was his ambition in his youth to become a Renaissance "complete man" in the style of Pico della Mirandola, and this is precisely what he eventually became. Sailor, diplomat, mathematician, poet and novelist, his main contribution has been in the small sealed off world of Aesthetics, and his book Le Nombre D'Or, published in Paris in 1930, remains an important landmark in the aesthetic history of France and beyond. These memoirs, however, are chiefly concerned not with the author's aesthetic theories, but with his adventures, many of which are as strange as those of Sinbad. Nearly being eaten by sharks while serving with the French Navy in the West Indies on one of the last great cruises under sail; escaping unscathed when visiting the front line at the Battle of the Aisne in 1915, but being genuinely wounded while acting as an extra in a mock battle for a film about the American War of Independence; taking part in a diplomatic mission to one of the last Shahs of the old dynasty of Persia, the description of which reads as outlandishly as the travels of Marco Polo--the reader is led from one colourful episode to the next. Throughout a life whose range of activity has been truly fantastic, the author, perhaps because he is a Romantic, has reacted to each new situation or discovery with the freshness and delight of a child. This complete absence of staleness or cynicism gives these unusual memoirs their unusual charm.
