BURROUGHS, William. The Naked Lunch. Paris: The Olympia Press. 1959.
Small format 8vo., original green card covers, ruled and lettered in black and white; pp. [vi], 7-225, [vii]; title border in green; a very good copy, the covers sun-bleached, particularly along the spine, creasing and rubbing to folds; compression to spine tips and some dirt marks to lower cover; offsetting to inside covers; dark stain to outer edge of text block, sometimes encroaching onto outer margin of pages; glue darkened and coming away at spine head; light smudge to ffep.
The true first edition, second state, with the rubber stamp to the lower cover. No. 76 in the Traveller’s Companion Series, printed in July 1959 by S.I.P., Montreuil, France.
A book which requires little by way of introduction, Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical ‘antinovel’ follows protagonist, opioid-addict William Lee through a series of vignettes in ‘Interzone’, a fictional location inspired by his travels in Tangier. Written after observing the
escalating violence between French authorities and Moroccan Nationalists over the political status of the country, as well as their open attitude to drug use and homosexuality, the resulting work describes a surreal wasteland full of political plots, medical experiments
and a blurring of lines between good and evil. Having recently attempted to quit his opioid addiction, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg that he “wrote nearly the whole of Naked Lunch on cannabis". The book was at first rejected, even by Olympia, for publication, due to its lack of structure. However, after excerpts published in the Chicago Review and Big Table magazines gained notoriety, the Press reconsidered. The first English edition was published here, in 1959.
The novel was controversial for its open descriptions of drug use, sadomasochism, and perhaps most famously, a talking anus. Its publication led to a series of legal challenges, bans and trials within America, during which time Burroughs’s friends and fellow beat-generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer were called to testify as to the book’s literary merit. Burroughs later wrote "The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."
Scarce thus.
Kearney (p. 90)
#2121623