WATT

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original magenta-coloured card covers, printed white and black to the front panel and lettered in black to the spine. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, with just mild rubbing and a small nick to the lower right corner of the spine. The contents, with a small, neat contemporary gift inscription to the upper corner of the front endpaper, are otherwise clean throughout and without any spotting. The spine is, as usual, rippled by the impress of the rear of the page block on the thin paper covering. Any reading creases are light and even. An uncommonly bright, clean and sharp copy of the first printing of Beckett's great second (published) novel.

One of 1,100 copies, this example remains unnumbered (the space for the number left blank). 'Watt', the second of Beckett's published novels, and arguably the strangest and most lovable of them all, was begun and completed in Paris – the earliest notebook entries are dated 11 February 1941, the latest 28 December 1944 – but mainly written in Roussillon, in the Vaucluse, between 1943 and 1945, while Beckett and his partner Suzanne were hiding from the occupying German forces (owing to Beckett's French Resistance work). He later described writing 'Watt' as 'a game, a means of staying sane', and the work is notable for taking his preoccupation with pattern, series, and permutational procedures to an extreme (C. J. Ackerley refers to its "peculiar pedantry and […] monstrous paradigms of mounting complexity"). The novel's many exhaustive (sometimes exhausting) set-pieces are, however, instrumental in shaping the work's distinctive texture and humour (it is a very funny book). After the war, a series of extracts from appeared in small magazines, but Beckett struggled to place the novel with a publisher. It was in association with one of those small magazines, 'Merlin' (edited by Alexander Trocchi, Richard Seaver, Christopher Logue among others), that the novel was finally published (under the 'Collection Merlin' imprint) by Maurice Girodias' Parisian Olympia Press on 31 August 1953 in an edition of 1,125 copies, 25 lettered and signed on deluxe paper, the standard edition of 1,100 numbered copies bound in wrappers coloured a shade of magenta which Beckett reportedly hated. ('Watt', edited by C. J. Ackerley [London: 2009]; Federman and Fletcher 32).