HOUSE OF INCEST

First US edition, first printing. Signed and inscribed presentation copy. Original orange cloth lettered and decorated in black to the front panel, lacking the scarce dustwrapper. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The cloth is a little dusty with a few light surface marks. Rubbed to spine tips, with a small split (c. 2.5 cm) to the cloth along the rear edge of the spine.

Inscribed by the author in black ink to the front free endpaper, "Marcus Blechman / a woman's Season / in Hell / Anaïs Nin". The recipient is the renowned photographer, Marcus Blechman, who was responsible for a number of memorable portraits of stars of Hollywood theatre and film (including Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson, and Helen Hayes). 'House of Incest', Nin's first work of fiction, was originally published in 1936 as 'The House of Incest' (later editions dropping the definite article) by Siana Editions in Paris. This edition, published the following decade, was issued by Nin's own Gemor Press. A short, concentrated, personal work, it is, according to her biographer Noel Riley Fitch, "her most complex work,[and] the best illustration of her literary beliefs in the primacy of psychological reality and the Jungian dreamworld". Her description of the work as "a woman's Season in Hell" in this copy's inscription, with its allusion to Rimbaud's great long prose poem (a work famously championed and translated by Nin's lover, Henry Miller) was one that she used again in a 1959 letter to Laurence Durrell, and is an indication that Nin thought of this strange, enigmatic work more as a poem in prose than as a novel. (Noël Riley Fitch, 'Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin', Boston: 1993; Franklin A2b).