The True First Edition, Signed by Virginia Woolf
WOOLF, Virginia. Orlando, a Biography. New York: Crosby Gaige. 1928.
8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered and decorated in gilt, top edge gilt, publishers image of a ram in gilt on front cover, retaining the original, very rare, black glassine wrapper; pp. 333, untrimmed and partly unopened throughout, with 8 half-tone photographic illustrations; a few very minor scuffs to boards, spine of wrapper detached from front panel at hinge with loss to spine, else near fine; author's signature in purple ink to verso of half title; contemporary bookseller's ticket 'The Holliday Bookshop … New York' to rear pastedown.
First edition, number 352 of 800 copies signed by the author in her distinctive purple ink, from a limited edition of 861 copies.
Orlando, an experimental biographical novel and feminist classic was inspired by Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West, to whom the book is dedicated and who appears in three of the book's photographic illustrations. The character of Orlando is based on Vita and the historical details are drawn extensively from her own book Knole and the Sackvilles (1922). Nigel Nicolson, Vita's son, described Orlando as 'the longest and most charming love-letter in literature'.
This American limited edition preceded by nine days the first trade edition, published by the Hogarth Press on 11 October 1928, and thus constitutes the first appearance of Woolf's masterpiece.
Kirkpatrick A11a
#2120180