O'Brien, Flann
At Swim-Two-Birds
£378
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs
Auction: 07 February 2024 from 10:00 GMT
Description
London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1939. First edition, 8vo, 316 pp., original green cloth (second-issue binding), spine toned, marked and rolled, rubbed at head and foot, tips slightly bumped, front board with small white mark and hint peripheral toning, contemporary ownership inscription to front free endpaper, small stains to lower margins of pp. 107 and 109, small nick to lower margin of pp. 127/8 and to fore margin of pp. 277/8
Footnote
First edition of the author's first novel, a milestone in modernist and Irish literature, rare. According to O'Brien's biographer only 244 copies of the first edition had been sold before the remaining stock was destroyed in an air raid on Longman's London premises in 1940 (Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien, 1989, p. 99). However, the existence of copies bound in black as well as green cloth, usually identified as representing the first and second issues respectively, tends to indicate the survival of at least a small number of unbound copies which were subsequently bound in green cloth as seen here. The work remained little known until its republication in 1960.