Jayson Lawrence (3 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Fair. Large 8vo HB. pp; 224, xvi (Publisher's list). Spotting and discolouration to edges of text-block but binding still tight. Fair in pale green cloth, lettered red to spine. Light rubbing to extremities, discolouration and marking to spine. A Very scarce memoir of schizophrenia and stays in (What were then called) asylums.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good-. Dust Jacket Condition: None. First Edition. 263pp; No DJ, light blue cloth boards with titling to spine, boards square & clean, spine age-toned, pages slightly age-toned, text unmarked, binding is tight, VG- condition. Scarce vintage account by man who attempted suicide and then spent a year in a mental asylum; he had lost his savings in the 1929 stock market crash and began hearing a voice in his head prompting him to try to drown himself in the ocean.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. 1st Edition. First edition/first printing. Blue-grey cloth-covered boards, 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches, 263 pp. Portions of the dustcover pasted to the front and rear pastedowns. An old "Classification of Mental Diseases" tipped in between the front pastedown and the front free endpaper (two printed pages with 22 entries, including "dementia praecox", the old term for schizophrenia). About good. Scarce. "I hope this book will change the current notions of people about asylum life, but doubt that it can do much. Conditioning against insanity is too ingrained to be suddenly reversed. Yet if the story does a little it will be useful. I have not concerned myself with statistics, although I am aware that one of every twenty spends some time in a mental sanatorium, and the number is increasing all the time. Tragic as these figures are, they do not tell the story of the many who find the asylum a sanctuary and who flourish within it. How this has been done in my own history I have tried to set down simply and fully." (K046).