JOHNSON, B.S. Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. London: Collins. 1973.
8vo. Green cloth backed boards with gilt lettering to spine; white dust jacket with title in stamp form over a financial list; pp. [10], 11-180, [12]; slight bumping to bottom of spine and minimal scuffing to top; otherwise fine.
First edition of what is considered B.S. Johnson's most comedic work.
Avant-garde novelist B.S. Johson’s penultimate, and arguably most humorous, novel, this is an astounding work of metafiction which tells the story of a frustrated accountant and his pursuit to rectify society's wrongs. Characters are innovatively self-conscious of their being persons of fiction, with Christie himself at one point protesting that there are too many exclamation marks in the novel in which he resides. In fact, Johnson himself evolves into his own character by the end of the novel, expressing apology to his protagonist that soon the book will have to come to its demise, as well as its fictitious parties. This was the last book to be published during Johnson’s lifetime, the same year as his tragic suicide at 40.
Speaking of the pressures of impending media culture, as well as his unusual perspective on the writing process itself, Johnson would comment “the only thing the novelist can with any certainty call exclusively his own is the inside of his own skull: and that is what he should be exploring”.
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