THE PORNOGRAPHER

First edition, first printing. Original ochre cloth with gilt lettering to the spine, in dustwrapper. A sharp, near fine copy, the binding tight and square. There's a small (3mm) indentation to the rear endpaper which remains (decreasingly) visible on the final ten pages (below the text). A previous owner (with a tiny, neat hand) has listed three page references in ink to the same endpaper, two of which point to paragraphs that have been marked by a few tiny dots in the margin. The unclipped dustwrapper is fine except for some minor toning to, and a small crease to the top of, the spine. Correctly priced (£4.95 net.) to the front flap.

The author's fourth novel. In his 2006 "Irish Times" tribute to McGahern, Colm Toibin remembers how, when a proof copy of "The Pornographer" arrived in the office of the Dublin magazine where he was working at the time, it was "read in a short time by a number of us who wrote for the magazine. We were in our early 20s and not special fans of the work of McGahern and yet we were stunned by the book. [I]n its sombre dramatisation of sex and death, it could equally have been written by a French existential novelist. Also, in the way the writer played with narrative, it could have been written by a modern anti-novelist. And yet it was rooted in a world which McGahern had already established in his three previous novels and two books of stories - the dull life of Ireland, full of rain and families and priests and early closing time."