A Compass Error

BEDFORD, Sybille

Published by Collins, London, 1968

About this Item

8vo, pp. 221. Original rose boards, lettered in gilt on spine. Faint trace of paper clip to front free endpaper. A fine copy in a near fine dustwrapper with the lightest of age-toning to rear panel. First edition. Author's complimentary slip laid in (which explains the trace of a paper clip to ffep). Known, read and admired by everybody during her lifetime but now chronically under-remembered, Sybille Bedford [1911-2006] is due a revival. Hounded out of her native Germany by the Nazis -- her lifelong friend Aldous Huxley assisted in her escape -- Bedford became a travel writer admired by Bruce Chatwin and a novelist admired by Waugh. She was also a fierce agitator for the cause of international law, and as a legal journalist covered the trials of (among many others) Jack Ruby, Lady Chatterley, anticolonial Algerian freedom fighters, and, in 1964, the monsters who ran Auschwitz. Bedford chronicled much of her gloriously unorthodox, wide-ranging life in three autobiographical novels, of which this is the second. That the book is as cheap as it is attests to how scandalously undervalued she has become. Buy now, before she's restored to glory.

Seller Inventory # 1342

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Compass Error
• Publisher: Collins, London
• Publication Date: 1968
• Seller catalogs:
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