EAST OF LAUGHTER

First edition, first printing. Limited edition, signed by the author and Gene Wolfe. Publisher's original purple cloth with white titles to the spine, in the Neil McCall illustrated dustwrapper and purple cloth slipcase. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owners' marks. Complete with the fine original dustwrapper that is without fading, loss or tears. Not price-clipped (£35.00 to the lower front flap). Housed in the lightly rubbed, structurally sound slipcase.

Issued in a limited edition of 260 copies, this example is numbered 148 and signed by R. A. Lafferty and Gene Wolf on the illustrated limitation page. There was also a trade edition of 750 copies (completing 1010 copies in total). Unique to this limited edition is Gene Wolfe's essay 'Scribbling Giant' and an additional story from Lafferty 'The Story of Little Brir-Rose'. A characteristically intricate, imaginatively far-flung Lafferty novel involving the Twenty One Pillars of Rectitude, the Seven Saints to insure the sanity of the World, the Seven Technicians to insure its correct mechanical working, and Seven Scribbling Giants to write its scenarios and histories. The extended, and wonderfully named, cast of characters listed at the start of the book includes Hilary Ardri, the Computerized Fish Tycoon, Gorgonius Pantera, piano-maker of the German Alps, Drusilla Evenrood, an East Sussex Lady, and Countess Maude Grogley, mother of Laughter-Lynn Casement (to name just a handful).