MURPHY

First John Calder edition, first printing (previously issued as a Calder Jupiter Book). Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp and bright, the contents clean throughout. In the fine, bright dustwrapper. Not price-clipped (£4.95 to the front flap). A lovely copy of an unusually scarce edition.

Preceded by 'A Dream of Fair to Middling Women' (1932), a novel which wouldn't see the light until 1992, and 'More Pricks than Kicks', the stories quarried from it and published in 1934, 'Murphy', Beckett's first published novel, was completed in 1936 and issued, after many rejections, by Routledge in 1938. If the earlier writings are brimming with the young author's distinctly Joycean energies, 'Murphy' is mature Beckett, the high jinks tempered by an Augustan poise (Fielding is there, but also Swift). Intricately plotted – and indeed plottable on maps of London and Dublin – the novel circles and forms around its eponymous character, its host of supporting characters providing what Beckett in a 1936 letter refers to as "wild and unreal dialogues". These passages, which troubled the publisher, were, Beckett explained, "the comic exaggeration of what elsewhere is expressed in elegy, namely, if you like, the Hermeticism of the spirit." Murphy the character is torn between the sanctuaries of such hermeticism ("the little world") and an outer world of parks, buses, ginger biscuits, and most acutely, his fiancée Celia, certainly the novel's most rounded and sympathetic character. The elegiac final chapter, in which she wheels her aged grandfather to the park to fly his kite, is one of the most perfect things Beckett ever wrote. Following the 1938 first edition, 'Murphy' wasn't reprinted in English until the US Grove Press Edition in 1957, a photographic facsimile of the Routledge text (the French translation was issued in 1947). John Calder later acquired the UK rights for the novel, publishing a reset and corrected edition in 1963 as the first in his series of Jupiter Books. This 1977 edition was the first 'Murphy' to be issued under the unadorned John Calder banner, and with the iconic Calder design. The text is that of the completely reset edition first issued in paperback by Pan Books (in association with Calder and Boyars) in 1973.