Signed by Ballard
BALLARD, J.G. Vermilion Sands. London: Jonathan Cape. 1973.
8vo. Original light blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine; pictorial wraparound dust jacket by Brian Knight, pp. [xi], 208; a fine copy.
First edition, first printing, signed by the author to the title page.
Vermilion Sands is described as a "latter day Palm Springs", home to a cohort of forgotten film stars and lost bohemians. Here is a place where the automated has successfully crushed human creativity; "dial-a-poem computers" have usurped the poet, a prediction of our contemporary dependencies on the virtual. As the jacket states, it is "a lair for…hangers-on and malignant obsessions – a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits of their mistresses in a grotesque parody of art; where prima donna plants are programmed to sing operatic arias…".
#2121508