SPEAK, MEMORY: A Memoir.

First UK edition, first printing. Publisher's original blue cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in the dustwrapper, the front panel showing a nineteenth-century illustration of the Mariinsky Palace, St Isaac's Cathedral and the Blue Bridge in St Petersburg. A very good copy, the binding firm and square, the contents, except for some light spotting to upper and fore-edges of the page block, and light offsetting to endpapers, are clean throughout. Upper spine tip lightly bumped. In the dustwrapper, rubbed and chipped to edges and extremities, with some light spotting (more visible to the reverse). There is the ghostly trace of a sticker (now removed) visible to the lower portion of the rear panel. Both the binding and dustwrapper are in their second state, the book in blue rather than green cloth, the dustwrapper with the 'Daily Mail Book of the Month' insignia overprinted to the spine and lower edge of the front flap, as issued. Not price-clipped (16/- net to the front flap). A presentable copy, in a better than usual example of the notoriously fragile wrapper.

The US edition of Nabokov's memoir, issued the same year as the UK version, was titled 'Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir'. 'Speak Memory, the title given to this UK edition, was the one kept when the work was reissued in both US and UK in 1967. The later version (subtitled 'An Autobiography Revisited') was extensively revised in light of the author's 1954 translation of the work into Russian from the original English. In the foreword to the revision, Nabokov explained that "[w]hile writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might be at fault. [...] What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth." The work is composed of fifteen discrete (though intricately connected) autobiographical essays, earlier versions of which had appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine. It is dedicated, as always, to the author's wife, Véra. (Field 1096).