Signed by Lawrence Durrell
DURRELL, Lawrence. The Black Book. London: Faber and Faber. 1973.
8vo. Black boards with fascimile authorial signature on front board and white title lettering to spine; black and white dustwrapper with wraparound illustration of an underwater creature; Pp. [8], 244; light scuffing to head of dustwrapper spine and mild rubbing to corners; otherwise near fine.
First English edition, signed and dated by Lawrence Durrell.
"In the writing of it, I first heard the sound of my own voice"- Lawrence Durrell.
The Black Book was published when Durrell was merely twenty-six years old. It was published as the first volume in The Villa Seurat Series created by Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Durrell in parallel with The Obelisk Press. Faber & Faber offered to publish the work in expurgated form, but on the advice of Miller, Durrell declined this offer and the work was not published in the UK until 1973 in this edition.
In Durrell's introduction to the first American edition (1960), he describes his intentions as being, "a two-fisted attack on literature by an angry young man of the thirties". The principal setting is an old residential hotel frequented by a consort of debaucherous characters introduced through a writer's abandoned diary as narrator 'Lawrence Lucifer' tracks their steady progress into squalid darkness…
Dylan Thomas would write of Durrell's prose: "Words like stones, throwing, rockerying, mossing, churning, sharpening, bloodsucking, melting, and a hard firewater flows and rolls through them".
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