Darconville’s Cat

First edition, second printing, first UK issue. [See note.] Publisher’s black cloth boards with gilt lettering to upper board and spine. Hamish Hamilton sticker to title page covering the Doubleday imprint. Cloth a little rubbed. Small smudge to tail-edge of book block and a few spots of foxing to the untrimmed fore-edge. In very good unclipped dust jacket with original price of $15.95 to front flap. Some light shelf wear and a few small scuff marks to upper panel. Tiny closed tear to head of spine. A very attractive copy of this scarce novel by Alexander Theroux. *** NOTE on the edition. Two years after Darconville’s Cat was published in America, Hamish Hamilton imported unsold copies from the American publisher Doubleday. They simply put a sticker on the title page with a new ISBN (0241109655) and put this out as the UK edition. Our copy is the second printing of the original edition, without the words ‘First Edition’ to copyright page and with a black square on page 483 as called for. The second printing was smaller than the first and followed the initial print run fairly quickly. The publisher had mistakenly printed page 483 as a page of asterisks, instead of a solid page of black, as Theroux intended (a la Tristram Shandy). They printed a small number of copies with the black block to accommodate him. This second printing is thought to be preferable to the first.