NABOKOV, Vladimir. Lolita. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1959.
8vo. Original black cloth lettered in silver to spine, in the unclipped dustwrapper designed by Eric Ayers; pp. 319, [1]; top edge pink (a little faded), a handful of light spots to fore-edge of the page block, three leaves with outer edges untrimmed, wrapper lightly rubbed to spine tips and corners, closed tear (c. 2.5 cm) to lower edge of front flap fold, some adhesive residue to upper edge of rear panel; a near fine copy, in like wrapper.
A bright, sharp first UK printing of Nabokov’s contentious novel.
Among the most maligned, misunderstood – and greatest – novels of the last century, Lolita needs little introduction. Completed in December 1953, it took five years to write. Rejected by every UK and US publisher to whom it was offered, the novel was eventually placed with Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris and issued in a pair of green Olympia paperbacks in September 1955 (Beckett’s Molloy, a book Nabokov admired, was issued by the press the same year). Initially receiving very little attention, at the end of the year, Graham Greene singled it out in The Sunday Times as one of his three best books of 1955. Owing to legal wranglings (it was banned in the UK and subsequently in France), the first US edition did not appear until 1958 (becoming an immediate bestseller, for all the wrong reasons), with this UK edition following in 1959.
SKU: 2124004