Description
Very Good in a Good dust jacket. First U.S. Book Club Edition, which preceded the trade edition and is thus, unusually, the true American first. Octavo, ~5 ¼” w x 7 ¾” h, 351 pp. 1945 stated on full title and copyright page. Red cloth boards with black titles. A sound copy, internally bright and clean. Unclipped, unpriced jacket designed by Lester M. Peterson. Some chipping around spine ends and corners as well as a ½” open tear to top front panel. Rear panel features blurbs from Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker on “Five Novels by Evelyn Waugh.” From the library of critic and biographer Joseph Frank and mathematician Marguerite Straus Frank, with ownership signature on the ffep from “Giugite Straus, Jan. 1 1946”—Giguite was Frank’s diminutive in her student days. “Perhaps … all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.” (p. 303)
