MASON & DIXON

First UK edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Raquel Jaramillo. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the dustwrapper, fine except for the merest (barely visible) fading to the spine and a touch of creasing to the upper spine tip. Not price-clipped (£16.99 to the front flap). A sharp, bright copy of Pynchon's fifth novel.

"Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair – one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic – from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason" (from the jacket's précis). In her New York Times review (April 29, 1997) of the novel, Michiko Kakutani praises Pynchon's "magician's ability to fuse history and fable, science and science fiction; his Swiftian grasp of satire and vaudevillian's sense of farce. It is a book that testifies to his remarkable powers of invention and sheer power as a storyteller, a storyteller who this time demonstrates that he can write a novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring."