THE HOURS AFTER NOON

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original burgundy cloth with silver titles to the spine, in the William Belcher illustrated dustwrapper. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the extremities very slightly rubbed. The contents, with the ownership stamp of the avant-garde writer, artist and filmmaker Peter Weiss and the stage designer and artist Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss at the rear are otherwise clean throughout. Complete with the lightly rubbed, nicked and creased original dustwrapper that has a few short closed tears at the edges and a single spot to the very faintly toned spine. Not price-clipped (15s on the front panel). A lovely copy.

Paul Bowles third collection of short stories of which there was no equivalent American edition. This copy is from the library of the prolific German playwright, novelist and filmmaker, Peter Weiss and his wife, the stage designer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. For anglophone audiences, Weiss is most famous for the play (later a film directed by Peter Brook), 'Marat/Sade'. For German audiences, his magnum opus is the three-volume novel, 'Die Ästhetik des Widerstands' (The Aesthetics of Resistance) (1975–1981). Weiss' works are the subject of an extended essay by the late W. G. Sebald ('The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss') collected in 'On the Natural History of Destruction' (2003).