Eighteenpence.

FIRST EDITION, pp. 180, crown 8vo, original green cloth, lettered in gilt to backstrip and upper board, spine cocked, corners pushed with a little rubbing to extremities and some light soiling, good. Printed at the author's expense in an edition of a thousand copies. The Foreword by J.B. Danquah announces it as 'an immeasurably important book', which 'marks a new epoch in Gold Coast approach to English literature', being 'the first long novel in English ever published by a Gold Coast man'. This claim ignores earlier examples, by J. E. Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi, and is modified by Stephanie Newell in 'Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana' (2002) to designate Obeng's work as 'the first full-length novel to have been produced by a "never-been", by a member of the class of aspirant, newly-educated "scholars" who emerged in the Gold Coast in the 1920s' - noting that, in distinction to his predecessors, Obeng had never travelled out of the region, a fact that is mentioned in Danquah's Foreword as inhibiting the verisimilitude of certain passages. Whatever its precise status in that regard, it is an important and scarce book; aside from the UK legal deposit libraries and the University of Kent, a copy resides at the University of Cape Town.…