Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli, The Music of Chance, City of Glass

I've been thinking about Paul Auster and David Mazzucchelli quite a bit lately. I bought this the other week in Lewes's Bow Windows Bookshop.

A 1991 Faber first edition of The Music of Chance, signed by Auster on the title page.

Years ago I saw (on the telly, and then again on a video I taped off the telly) and loved Philip Haas's 1993 film adaptation of the novel, starring Mandy Patinkin and James Spader, and with a new novel from Auster due in a matter of days (4321, a breeze block of a book which seemingly explores similar territory to Kate Atkinson's Life After Life), I figured now was as good a time as any to read the source text. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of what I loved about the film – its theme of fate versus free will, of how life can seem both dizzyingly random and crushingly predetermined – is present in the novel, although I don't recall there being much of Jim Nashe's aimless road trip in the film – where I think he picks up hitchhiking gambler Jack Pozzi pretty early on – whereas in the book the opening 20 pages are given over to Nashe's zigzag across America, a segment I found exhilarating in its freedom and irresponsibility, and even more so when weighed against the oppressive, increasingly nightmarish situation – building a pointless wall at the behest of a pair of vindictive, manipulative millionaires – Nashe and Pozzi wind up in.

Thinking about Auster got me thinking about David Mazzucchelli, and led me to suggest to the Marvel Fact Files (who I write a fair bit for) that I do a profile on the cartoonist. I've only read one other Paul Auster novel – 1992's Leviathan – but I have read Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik's graphic novel adaptation of City of Glass, Auster's debut novel (under his own name; he published a crime novel, Squeeze Play, as Paul Benjamin in 1982).

I read it in 2004, when it was reissued by Picador, having been unable to lay my hands at the time on its 1994 Avon original edition – this being before the internet became a thing on which you could buy pretty much anything. Whereas nowadays a copy of that Avon edition, which was published as part of the Neon Lit: Noir Illustrated series spearheaded by the late Bob Callahan (who provides a thoughtful introduction to the Avon edition) and the not late Art Spiegelman (who provides an illuminating introduction to the Picador edition), can be had online for as little as a penny (plus postage).

The other day I reread City of Glass – in its Avon edition, which I bought online for as little as a penny (plus postage) – and it remains a remarkable, formally inventive piece of comics, part PI mystery, part rumination on chance and circumstance and destiny. Mazzucchelli described it (to Indy Magazine's Bill Kartalopoulos) as not so much an adaptation as a translation from one language to another, further noting in a Comics Journal interview that there was nothing visual about the original novel. As a result, in sections the naturalistic style Mazzucchelli adheres to for much of the narrative veers off into symbolism and iconography, notably during the sequences dealing with the character Peter Stillman's damaged mind.

For background to the Marvel Fact Files piece I dug out my collection of Mazzucchelli comics: Daredevil #226–233 (Mazzucchelli and Frank Miller's brilliant, revolutionary Born Again storyline); Batman #404–407 (the same pairing's even more brilliant, even more revolutionary Year One story); issues #1 and 3 of Mazzucchelli's Rubber Blanket anthology (I don't own the elusive #2, and nor do many other people); various issues of Drawn & Quarterly and Zero Zero containing Mazzucchelli strips; Superman and Batman: World's Funnest, which features a four-page sequence where Mazzucchelli channels Jack Kirby; Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli's 2009 graphic novel; even the second issue of Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book, one page of which was apparently inked, uncredited, by Mazzucchelli (although I've no idea which one). I think I have Marvel Fanfare #40 as well, which contains a Mazzucchelli-drawn story featuring the X-Men's Angel, but if I do have it it's somewhere in the loft in one of two dozen comic boxes. And there are other Mazzucchelli short stories in various anthologies that I don't own; perhaps if I get my hands on some of them, and track down that Marvel Fanfare, I'll do a post on Mazzucchelli's short stories.

W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden, or, The British Agent (Collins 7D Novel, 1934)

No. 4 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly... except in this instance I have blogged about the novel, both properly and repeatedly. Admittedly I discussed different editions to this one – and indeed different books entirely – but even so... I've gone and made a nonsense of my rationale for this series of posts already, haven't I?

What is it?
An early edition of W. Somerset Maugham's archetypal 1928 spy novel Ashenden, or, The British Agent, published in, I believe, 1934 (the book is undated) by Collins as part of their 7D Novels range – a short-lived but fascinating initiative on the part of the publisher whereby hardbacks were issued at the bargain price of sevenpence; see the excellent Paperback Revolution site for more.

Who designed the dust jacket?
No idea, although judging by other examples of Collins 7D novel dust jackets I've found online – see here and here – I would guess the same artist was responsible for a good many of the wrappers in the range.

Where and when did I buy it?
On AbeBooks, from the History Bookshop in Bourton on the Water, just last week.

Why did I buy it?
A number of reasons. For one thing, Ashenden is by far the best book I've read over the past few years, a beautifully written, wonderfully measured yet devastatingly affecting novel, and a peerless piece of spy fiction to boot. For another, although I already own two editions of Ashenden – a 1934 Heinemann Collected Edition and a 1941 Doubleday edition, which boast slightly different versions of a preface Maugham provided especially for each – there was something about this petite Collins edition – perhaps that glorious dust jacket design (could the swooning woman be Giulia Lazzari, or even poor Mrs. Caypor from "The Traitor"...?), perhaps the edition's scarcity (I can't see any other copies online at present, although there is a London Book Co./Novel Library version with a recoloured jacket) – that captivated me.

And then upon receiving the book at the start of this week, I realised there's another aspect that made it worth acquiring (aside from the sweet little vintage sticker on the front endpaper, affixed by "R. Burlington, Bookseller, Whitehaven" – at the time that Cumbrian town's longest trading business)  – something that's absent from the Heinemann Collected Edition and the Doubleday edition: a five-line dedication, to Maugham's friend, Gerald Kelly, describing the novel, with admirable understatement, as a "narrative of some experiences during the Great War of a very insignificant member of the Intelligence Department".

Lastly, it's my birthday tomorrow, so I thought I'd treat myself. Happy birthday to me.

Have I read it yet?
Yes!

Sarah Gainham, The Silent Hostage (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960)

No. 3 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do.

What is it?
A first edition of Sarah Gainham's fifth novel, The Silent Hostage, published in hardback by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1960.

Who designed the dust jacket?
It doesn't have a dust jacket; The Silent Hostage is one of a small number of novels published by Eyre & Spottiswoode around this period that were bound under pictorial laminated boards rather than under the traditional arlin boards with dust jacket (see also from 1960 Colin Watson's Bump in the Night and David West's Wish Me Dead). But in any case, the cover design and photo are uncredited.

Where and when did I buy it?
I believe I bought it on a visit to book dealer Jamie Sturgeon's house four years ago.

Why did I buy it?
As Jamie explained to me at the time, examples of this unusual style of jacketless hardback binding – unusual, that is, for first editions of novels of this vintage – are quite uncommon (there are, at present, only one or two of those aforementioned Colin Watson and David West first editions available online, and only one British first of The Silent Hostage), so that was a factor. Mostly, however, it was because I'm interested in Sarah Gainham – she was a fascinating writer – and especially her early spy thrillers – particularly first editions thereof – and The Silent Hostage was one that I didn't have in first (it is, as already noted, pretty scarce).

Have I read it?
I have not.

Carol by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1990); Orig. The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (Coward-McCann, 1952): Book Review

To flick through the 'other books by' pages of Patricia Highsmith first editions from the 1950s to the late 1980s, one would be forgiven for assuming that her second published novel was The Blunderer (1954 US/1956 UK). In fact her second novel was The Price of Salt, published under the nom de plume Claire Morgan in 1952 (by Coward-McCann in the US, after Harper & Bros, publishers of Highsmith's 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, rejected it) so as to avoid Highsmith becoming labelled, as she later put it, "a lesbian-book writer". It took until 1990 for the novel to finally emerge from the closet and become an authorised part of her backlist when it was reissued as Carol by Diogenes in Switzerland and Bloomsbury in the UK (both editions featuring Tolouse-Lautrec's L'abandon, les deux amies on the cover), Highmith having at long last been persuaded to publish it under her own name.

Which isn't to say that the book hadn't been tremendously successful under its prior author name and title. In a new afterword to the novel printed in the Bloomsbury edition of Carol (recently made available in edited form on The Telegraph website), Highsmith revealed how after gaining "some serious and respectable reviews when it appeared in hardcover in 1952... the real success came a year later with the paperback edition [published by Bantam in the States], which sold nearly a million copies and was certainly read by more". She added: "The fan letters came in addressed to Claire Morgan, care of the paperback house. I remember receiving envelopes of ten and fifteen letters a couple of times a week for months on end."

The Price of Salt was reprinted by Bantam at least four times in the years following its initial publication, and was reissued by Macfadden-Bartell in the US in 1969 and again by Naiad Press in 1984. Each time it was published under the Claire Morgan alias (despite the best efforts of the publishers), and though word had begun to circulate as to the true identity of Claire Morgan long before Bloomsbury published Carol, the arrival of the retitled edition under Highsmith's own name was sufficient to prompt a wave of publicity, including newspaper interviews and a television appearance (on BBC 2's The Late Show, whose Sarah Dunant – according to Highsmith's biographer, Andrew Wilson – called the new edition "a literary coming out").

Doubtless there'll be another surge of interest in the novel in the run-up to the release of Todd Haynes's Rooney Mara/Cate Blanchett-starring film adaptation (which was praised by the critics at Cannes in May); already this year there have been articles on Highsmith in The Guardian and the Daily Mail. If Haynes's film brings the book and Highsmith to a new audience, so much the better, because Carol deserves to be widely read, especially by those who might otherwise dismiss Highsmith as a crime writer.

The story of a romance between Therese, a young shop assistant at a New York department store, and Carol, a well-to-do housewife whom Therese serves a few days before Christmas, the novel has its basis in a fleeting encounter Highsmith had with "a blondish woman in a fur coat" when Highsmith, like Therese, was working in the toy department of a store (Bloomingdale's, as opposed to the novel's fictional Frankenberg's) in December 1948. The woman bought a doll for her daughter, left her address for delivery and departed, but this seemingly ordinary episode left Highsmith feeling "odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision". That evening at home, Highsmith wrote out an eight-page outline for The Price of Salt. (In his 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson identified the woman as Kathleen Senn, and discovered that she had committed suicide in 1951, a fact of which Highsmith was unaware.)

Informed by Highsmith's love affairs with married middle class socialites like Virginia Kent Catherwood and Kathryn Hamill Cohen (wife of Dennis Cohen, the founder of the Cresset Press, British publishers of Strangers on a Train and later The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley), the novel is a relatively straightforward account of the relationship that develops between Therese and the older, more sophisticated Carol. In that sense it's an atypical book in the Highsmith canon, but in its unflinching portrayal of romantic infatuation and with its measured yet compulsive pacing and what Anthony Price called "the unpretentious simplicity of the Highsmith prose" – and yet still complex in the way it communicates the inner turmoil of Therese (the novel's point-of-view character) – it's recognisably the work of the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), This Sweet Sickness (1960) and The Cry of the Owl (1962), and as good in its own way as any of those novels.

It's unlikely I'll ever be able to afford a 1952 Coward-McCann first edition of The Price of Salt, pictured above; those run into the thousands of pounds. Thankfully British first editions of the novel – i.e. the 1990 Bloomsbury edition of Carol – are rather more reasonably priced; I picked up the copy illustrating this post for £3.50 in Oxfam Books in Bloomsbury, appropriately enough, and copies can be had online for around a tenner. I've added my one to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery (where an uncorrected proof of the Bloomsbury edition can also be found) – and I'll have more on Highsmith and Bloomsbury (as in the publisher) soon.*

NB: This post linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 25/9/15.

* Update, 30/3/16: A couple of months after I posted this, I sold my copy of the Bloomsbury first edition on eBay for over £30, which is probably a better indication of the going rate for a first in the wake of the Carol film. Decent copies of the Bloomsbury first are in shorter supply these days too... although not in as short supply as the Bloomsbury proof of Carol, where there are at present no copies for sale online. Fortunately I kept my one.

Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and The Lawless Roads: 1959–1960 Heinemann Library Editions

NB: Linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Further to my recent post on the thirteen-book 1959–60 Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene, with their beautiful wraparound Peter Edwards dust jackets, a couple of updates: Existential Ennui reader Henk Konings contacted me with some information about, and images of, a book in the edition that he owns – one that I didn't even realise was in the edition (I've only managed to collect two thirds of the edition thus far); plus I myself have acquired another book in the edition, perhaps the most desirable one of all, if the novel's fame and this edition's scarcity are anything to go by. Let's take a look at that new acquisition first:

Brighton Rock, originally published by Heinemann in 1938, and published into the Heinemann Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene in 1959, number L2 in the edition. I spotted this copy on eBay the other week and nabbed it for fifteen quid – an absolute bargain, I reckon, considering its scarcity and that a comparable copy of the book on AbeBooks – one of only two jacketed copies of the Library Edition of the novel on that site, both offered by the same seller – with a similarly chipped dust jacket, is priced at £90. That copy, however, like the other copy offered by the seller (which is priced at a rather steep £225, although that one's in better condition), is a 1962 reprint of the 1959 edition – whereas my copy is a 1959 first printing of the Library Edition:

Which makes it a very rare book indeed. But not as rare as the Library Edition book that Henk owns:

The Lawless Roads, originally published by Heinemann in 1939 and issued in the Library Edition in 1960, number L12. Until Henk emailed me, while I had a pretty good idea of which Greene works twelve of the books in the Library Edition were – the ones I own myself, obviously, plus those I'd worked out from my research – there was one I just couldn't nail down. Turns out that book was The Lawless Roads, Greene's account of a journey he took across Mexico in 1938. And the reason I couldn't determine what it was, was that there are no copies whatsoever for sale online. So, my thanks to Henk for solving that mystery, and well done to him for securing such a rare book... and I guess well done to me for securing one that's almost as rare.

I've added both Brighton Rock and The Lawless Roads to my original post on the Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene, and appended a list of the thirteen books that I'm aware of in the edition, although I don't (yet) know the L numbers of the ones I don't (yet) own; anyone who does, do please let me know. I've also, naturally, added Peter Edwards's wonderful wrappers to the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page.

NB: A further update can be found here.

The Ministry of Fear (1943) by Graham Greene: Book Review, 1960 Heinemann Library Edition

NB: Proffered for this Friday's Forgotten Books round-up.

When I started collecting the 1959–60 Heinemann Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene a few months back, one of the books I was keenest to acquire was The Ministry of Fear (orig. 1943, Library Edition 1960). It wasn't merely the splendid dust jacket design of the Library Edition – created, like all the other Library Edition wrappers, by Peter Edwards (and I'll have a couple more examples of his work to add to my post on the Library Editions very soon) – that made me want the book; it was also the novel itself, one of Greene's more espionage-inclined pieces of fiction, so I surmised, and therefore of particular interest to me.

But there's a lot more to the thing than mere "entertainment", as Greene himself once styled his more genre-leaning works. Though Greene intended the novel to be, as he put it in his memoir Ways of Escape (The Bodley Head, 1980), "a funny and fantastic thriller" – inspired to an extent by a Michael Innes book he'd recently read – there's an unexpected depth to it as well. In part this is down to the writer's vivid evocation of London during the Blitz, penned while the bombs were falling (although the novel was actually written while Greene was stationed in Freetown, Sierra Leone, having been recruited by the Secret Service) – striking, startling asides peppered throughout the book, of a populace "quite accustomed to sleeping underground", of "twenty thousand people... dead already", of war being "very like a bad dream in which familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely disguises" – which serve to offset the more "fantastic" elements of the story and ground the narrative in a tangible veracity.

But it's also the added undercurrent of pain and suffering which weaves through the story, personified by the novel's lead, Arthur Rowe, an essentially decent man and yet a convicted murderer even so (in fact a mercy killing). At a fete in a city square Rowe comes into possession of a copy of Charlotte M. Yonge's The Little Duke and a cake – he can be seen clutching both on Peter Edwards's Library Edition dust jacket. The cake is important for plot purposes – seemingly there's something baked inside it which leads Rowe to be drawn into a foreign power's plot to obtain secret British government papers and consequently to be accused of another murder and detained in a psychiatric hospital – but The Little Duke, from which Greene quotes lines at the start of each chapter, is significant as regards the themes of the novel: the spirit of adventure and the loss of innocence.

That loss of innocence applies to both Arthur as an individual and Britain as a nation at war – "The little duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognise the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place" – and is made explicit in a dream Arthur has while sheltering in the underground during an air raid, in which he has tea on the lawn with his dead mother:

"This isn't real life any more," he said. "Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it's not there any more."

His mother smiled at him in a scared way but let him talk; he was the master of the dream now. He said, "I'm wanted for a murder I didn't do. People want to kill me because I know too much. I'm hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all around me. You remember St. Clement's – the bells of St. Clement's. They've smashed that – St. James's, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland's Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime, Maples and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller, doesn't it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but, dear, that's real life; it's what we've all made of the world since you died. I'm your little Arthur who wouldn't hurt a beetle and I'm a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux."

Greene reasons in Ways of Escape that in writing The Ministry of Fear "a little of the love [of London] crept, I think, into the book", and this too can be glimpsed in fleeting moments, such as the man feeding sparrows by putting bits of bread between his lips so that the birds "hovered round his mouth giving little pecks at it as though they were kissing him". But the war and the Blitz pervade all – inescapable, searing their terrible and surprising imagery onto the pages: a bomb that destroys Rowe's lodgings, leaving him in the ruins gazing at "an enormous quantity of saucepans all over the floor: something like the twisted engine of an old car [which] turned out to be a refrigerator"; "shell-shocked men" in the psychiatric hospital, "quietly weeping in a corner"; at Paddington Station "season-ticket holders... making a quick get-away from the nightly death"; "a drunk soldier sat alone on a waste of platform vomiting between his knees".

"[The Ministry of Fear] is my favourite among what I called then my 'entertainments'," Greene wrote in Ways of Escape (he eventually dispensed with the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" in his backlist), although he wished "that the espionage element had been less fantastically handled, though I think Mr Prentice of the Special Branch is real enough – I knew him under another name in my own organisation when I was his pupil". He continues:

The scenes in the mental clinic are to my mind the best in the novel... I think too the atmosphere of the blitz is well conveyed. The three flares which Rowe saw come "sailing slowly, beautifully, down, clusters of spangles off a Christmas tree," I had watched myself, flattened up against the wall of Maple's store on the night of the great raid of April 16, 1941, some months before I left for Africa.

To all of which I would simply add that The Ministry of Fear is the best of Greene's novels that I've read (The Human Factor, 1978, would be a distant-ish second) and by far the best book that I've read this year.

The Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene, 1959–1960, Peter Edwards Dust Jackets

From his debut novel in 1929, The Man Within, until his eighteenth in 1961, A Burnt-Out Case, Graham Greene's principal English publisher was William Heinemann Ltd. (After A Burnt-Out Case Greene left Heinemann for The Bodley Head, where in 1957 he had been made a director by his friend Max Reinhardt, Managing Director of the publishing house; see Norman Sherry's The Life of Graham Greene Volume 3: 1955–1991.) With the exception of Greene's second and third novels, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), which the writer repudiated and which were never reprinted, all of Greene's books were reprinted in hardback by Heinemann multiple times throughout the 1930s, '40s and '50s, either in their original form or in the reset Uniform Edition of 1947–55, with their austere red and grey dust jackets. Then, in 1959, Heinemann introduced a striking new edition of Greene's books: The Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene.

I was unaware of the Library Edition until earlier this year, when I chanced upon a 1959 Library Edition of Greene's 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter in Colin Page Antiquarian Books in Brighton. I was immediately taken with the lovely wraparound dust jacket, which was designed by Peter Edwards, best known these days, along with his wife Gunvor, as illustrator of the Thomas the Tank Engine Railway Series from 1963–1972, and as the book was only £3.50, I snapped it up. Later, after some further investigation, I discovered that Heinemann had issued over a dozen of Greene's novels in the Library Edition, all with Peter Edwards wrappers; and as there were a number of Greene's novels that I wanted to read, in particular his "entertainments", as the author styled his more crime- and espionage-inclined books, I set about trying to collect some of them.

No easy task. Though some books in the Library Edition reprinted two or three times, they proved tricky to track down, and even where they could be found in amongst the various Uniform Editions and Collected Editions listed online, they frequently lacked dust jackets or were ex-library copies or, worse, rebinds. But after a little work, I managed to secure a further six books in the edition, making seven altogether, a good many of them first printings.

Naturally I've added their dust jackets to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, but I've gathered them together here also – along with jacket flaps and cases, the latter all with the red cloth boards characteristic of the edition – to demonstrate what an exceptional body of work Peter Edwards's little-seen wrappers are. (Click on the images to see them bigger.) Books are arranged in order of original publication of the novels rather the Library Edition numbering, which can be found on the jacket flaps and which runs in a different sequence; I've noted those numbers at the end of the publishing info for each title.

The Man Within, Heinemann, orig. 1929, Library Edition 1959 (third reprint, 1968), L9
Greene's 1929 debut novel, this is a good illustration of the perils of collecting the Library Editions. I knew from the online listing that this was an ex-library copy, so the fact that the front endpaper had been removed didn't come as a surprise; but I didn't know that this copy was the 1968 reprint of the 1959 Library Edition (which also reprinted in 1960 and 1964), and nor was I aware that the jacket front flap was torn, and the back flap was completely loose. Still, the book was cheap, and now that I've repaired the back flap the thing looks presentable enough.

The novel is set in and around my stomping ground of Lewes and the Sussex Downs; Peter Edwards's jacket illustration could almost be the view from Mount Caburn down to Newhaven, were it not for the absence of the River Ouse. And on the jacket front flap, note the book's number in the edition: not L1, as one might suppose of Greene's debut, but L9; L1, as I'll demonstrate shortly, is taken by a much later novel.

. . . . . . . . . .

Stamboul Train, Heinemann, orig. 1932, Library Edition 1959, L3
This was an extremely fortunate find, which I acquired from an Italian seller on eBay for just under ten euros (about seven quid). There are no other copies of the first printing of the 1959 Library Edition currently available online that I can see, just a single copy of the 1960 reprint of the edition, priced at £100, and a few jacketless copies of the 1965 reprint priced at around a fiver. The first of Greene's self-styled "entertainments", Peter Edwards's dust jacket depicts the sequence in the novel where the Orient Express – the "Stamboul Train" of the title – is stopped at Subotica.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Confidential Agent, Heinemann, orig. 1939; Library Edition 1960, L11
There are just three other copies of the Library Edition of The Confidential Agent available online at present, one a 1965 reprint of said which lacks a dust jacket, the others first printings priced at around £20 and £175. My first printing cost £4.30, and though the jacket is a little rubbed and chipped, it still shows off Peter Edwards's evocative artwork well – one of the best of his designs for the Library Edition wrappers that I've seen, I think.

The third of Greene's "entertainments", The Confidential Agent could well be my next Greene read (after Our Man in Havana, which I'm currently reading).

. . . . . . . . . .

The Power and the Glory, Heinemann, orig. 1940, Library Edition 1959 (first reprint, 1960), L1
My most recent acquisition in the Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene – it arrived in the post yesterday. I noticed this 1960 printing of the 1959 edition online a month or so ago, but there were other Greene novels I was keener to read, plus it was a reprint; so it was only last week that I finally decided to buy it: it was a good price – less than twenty quid (including postage), as opposed to £100 for the only other jacketed copy of this printing currently available in the UK – and both book and jacket, the latter with its splendid Goya-esque painted artwork, are in near fine condition.

Bizarrely, The Power and the Glory is number 1 in the Library Edition, despite being Greene's eighth novel (or tenth if you count the two early novels he disowned). If there's a rationale for the numbering in the edition, I've yet to discern it.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Ministry of Fear, Heinemann, orig. 1943, Library Edition 1960, L8
I'll be posting a review of this fine novel soon enough; suffice it to say of the story here that Peter Edwards's jacket, with its vision of a Blitz-blasted London, barrage balloons floating overhead, and with the novel's lead, Arthur Rowe, in the foreground, his face unseen, clutching (as the story makes clear) a copy of Charlotte M. Yonge's The Little Duke in one hand and a cake in the other, subtly and cleverly hints at the nature of the novel without giving too much away.

A curious copy of the Library Edition of The Ministry of Fear, this one. To all intents and purposes it's the 1960 first printing of that edition – certainly the copyright page in the book states as much; but the front flap of the jacket bears a decimal price rather than a shillings one, and it sports an ISBN (or SBN), a numbering system which wasn't introduced in publishing until the mid-1960s. It also lacks its Library Edition number – although I know that's L8, as before I acquired this copy of the book from a New Zealand seller, I bought a cheapo ex-library 1963 first reprint of this edition which turned out to be (shudder) a trimmed-down rebind (it's a good centimetre shorter and cased in shiny black faux leather).

So it's a bit of a mystery. I suppose it's conceivable the price on the flap is in New Zealand pounds, which was the currency over there until 1967 (when the NZ dollar was introduced), but that doesn't explain the ISBN. It's possible the jacket was taken from a later printing and married to a 1960 first printing book, but what little wear there is on both wrapper and book suggests they've been together for quite some time. Still, no matter: there's only one other jacketed copy of the Library Edition of the novel available online that I'm aware of, a 1963 reprint offered at £100, and I didn't pay anything like that, even with postage – plus the condition is near fine, some fading on the jacket spine aside.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Heart of the Matter, Heinemann, orig. 1948, Library Edition 1959 , L5
The book that started this particular collecting obsession. When I tweeted a picture of Peter Edwards's wrapper shortly after buying this copy, there was quite a bit of interest from some of the book designer folk I interact with on Twitter. I'll be interested to learn what they think of Edwards's other jackets for the Library Edition.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Quiet American, Heinemann, orig. 1955, Library Edition 1960, L13
The Library Edition of The Quiet American is actually the first reprint of the novel altogether. I'm quite familiar with The Quiet American – I've written about it before – and to my mind Peter Edwards's dust jacket evokes the novel beautifully.

I'm unsure as to whether the Library Edition continued past this point, number 13 in the series. I've seen some info online which suggests that both Loser Takes All (orig. 1955) and A Burnt-Out Case (orig. 1961) were published into the edition (but perhaps not Our Man in Havana, orig. 1958), but I've not been able to confirm that, and nor have I seen any evidence of Peter Edwards wrappers for those books.* If anyone can shed any light there, or supply some of the Library numbers of other titles in the edition that I don't (yet) own,** or even better, owns any of the Library Editions I'm missing and is willing to part with them, do please either leave a comment or email me using the email address in the sidebar. I'll update this post with whatever information I receive, and whichever books in the edition I acquire, as and when.

The Thirteen Books in the Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene

The Power and the Glory (L1)
Brighton Rock (L2)
Stamboul Train (L3)
The End of the Affair (L4)
The Heart of the Matter (L5)
It's a Battlefield (L6)
England Made Me (L7)
The Ministry of Fear (L8)
The Man Within (L9)
A Gun for Sale (L10)
The Confidential Agent (L11)
The Lawless Roads (L12)
The Quiet American (L13)

* Commenter Guy Pujol subsequently confirmed that the Library Edition comprised just the thirteen titles listed above.

** Thanks also to Guy for supplying those missing numbers and making the above list possible.

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Addendum I, 24/7/15; see this post for the background to these additions.

Brighton Rock, Heinemann, orig. 1938, Library Edition 1959, L2

. . . . . . . . . .

The Lawless Roads, Heinemann, orig. 1939, Library Edition 1960, L12 (images courtesy Henk Konings)

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Addendum II, 28/7/17; see this post for the background to these additions.

The End of the Affair, Heinemann, orig. 1951, Library Edition 1959, L4 (image courtesy Martina Weatherley)

. . . . . . . . . .

England Made Me, Heinemann, orig. 1935, Library Edition 1960, L7 (image courtesy Martina Weatherley)

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Addendum III, 25/8/15; see this post for the background to these additions.

It's a Battlefield, Heinemann, orig. 1934, Library Edition 1959, L6 (image courtesy Chris Fisher)

A Gun for Sale, Heinemann, orig. 1936, Library Edition 1960, L10 (image courtesy Chris Fisher)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Library Edition of the Works of Graham Greene (image courtesy Guy Pujol)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Power and the Glory (continental paperback edition), Heinemann/Nederland N.V., 1961 (image courtesy Henk Konings)

The Heart of the Matter (continental paperback edition), Heinemann/Nederland N.V., 1961 (image courtesy Henk Konings)