THE MEZZANINE; ROOM TEMPERATURE; U AND I: Three Volumes.

First UK editions, first printings. Three volumes. Original black cloth lettered in silver to spines, in the Senate-designed dustwrappers. A fine set, the bindings square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the fine, bright dustwrappers, with just a touch of light surface scuffing to the front panel of 'U and I'. Not price-clipped (£10.95, £11.99, and £12.99 to front flaps). A lovely set of Baker's first three books.

First UK editions of Nicholson Baker's three short, perfectly formed early books, in their uniform Senate designed black-and-white-spined Granta livery. Each unique, yet complementary, the books can be read as an informal trilogy of sorts. 'The Mezzanine' (1989) is the story of one man's lunch hour during which the narrator ponders a series of seemingly small questions (Why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? What happened to the paper drinking straw?) to cumulatively profound effect. Described by Nigel Smith in the TLS as "a delightfully Baconian novel, in which an unremittingly granular prose captures the patterns by which endless minutiae are arranged", it is also delightfully Nabokovian, relishing every detail, resemblance, or pattern (often in the extended footnotes vying with the main text). 'Room Temperature' (1990) is set during twenty minutes of an autumn afternoon while its narrator sits down in a rocking chair to feed his infant daughter. "The 'corporate setting' of 'The Mezzanine' gives way", Martin Amis wrote in 'The Independent on Sunday', "to the domestic landscape and the sacraments of marriage and parenthood, in a prose full of cadences and free of false quantities, beneath which the engine-room of English Literature confidently thrums." 'U and I' is a memoir and a book about John Updike: a book about Updike and Baker (the 'U' and 'I' of the title), about reading and memory (and what can be kept in mind), as well as an excruciatingly honest, very funny, act of self-exposure. As Amis remarked of these books, "Baker's perceptual style is both gleefully perverse and wantonly sunny: [...] there is barely an ordinary sentence or an ungenerous thought."