PROUST

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original brown and cream paper covered boards, in blue and cream dustwrapper, both bearing Edward Bawden's swimming dolphin illustration to the front and rear. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm with light spotting to the boards. The contents, with two previous owner's signatures to the front endpaper are otherwise clean throughout. The top edge of the text block is a little dusty. Complete with the lightly rubbed dustwrapper, that has tiny chips at the head of the toned spine. Not price-clipped (2s. net to the front flap). A lovely copy.

Samuel Beckett's extended essay on Marcel Proust, his second separately (and first commercially) published work, came about as a result of the first: the long poem 'Whoroscope' (1930) was awarded first prize in a competition sponsored and judged by the novelist and poet Richard Aldington and publisher-poet Nancy Cunard, and published in 1930 by Cunard's Hours Press. Two days after Beckett won the prize, Aldington wrote to Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus to suggest that Beckett should write a short book on Proust (who had died in 1922) for the Dolphin Books series (which had already published books by Aldous Huxley, Aldington, and Beckett's friend Thomas MacGreevy). The short book, which concentrates on Proust's great novel ("There is no allusion in this book to the legendary life and death of Marcel Proust, nor to the garrulous old dowager of the Letters, nor to the poet, nor to the author of the Essays, nor to the Eau de Selzian correlative of Carlyle's 'beautiful bottle of soda-water", he explains in the Foreword), bears the fingerprint of the young Beckett in its intellectual high jinks and acerbic, epigrammatic wit ("Death has not required us to keep a day free"; "Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit"), illuminating its author as much as, if not more than, its subject. (Federman and Fletcher 7; Mitchell A2a).