The Black Book

Bindings are tight and square. Text clean, light even toning. Moderate shelf handling wear. Dust Jacket with price is in a new clear protective Mylar sleeve has evidence of shelf handling with a small loss on the bottom of the spine. Prelude to Justine. First published in 1938 by the Obelisk Press. The novel shows several surrealist influences, and these may be in part related to materials from the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, about which Henry Miller was sending Durrell materials from Herbert Read. In reviewing it in The Observer, Philip Toynbee wrote, 'This is a wild, passionate, brilliantly gaudy and flamboyant extravaganza; it is intrinsically and essentially, the book of a young man - Durrell was 24 when he wrote it - richly obscene, energetically morbid, very often very funny indeed, self-pitying, but, above all, stylistically and verbally inventive as no other young man's novel of the period was even attempting to be.' Very Good in a Very Good Dust Jacket.