Out Pit by Pick (2 results)

Hard Cover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. First edition. Two inch chip and half inch chip to jacket spine, sticker on rear jacket panel, a few minor chips to jacket edges. 1951 Hard Cover. 286 pp. A novel of "British proletarian realism" about a British miner and a worker's strike. "'Pit ruins you for any other job unless you're real bright or just bloody stupid.' Dave Stand is neither real bright nor bloody stupid. He is a young miner, sensitive beyond the ordinary, who like many others looks for personal meaning in his work, and fails bitterly to find it. Dave gets a part in a documentary film to be made at the Pit where he works; his life is at once intensified and complicated. He sees on the one hand the alien "liberating" world of the film men; on the other, Tandy Collins and his fellow workers in a nationalized mine. He is forced to choose between them; and his choice is made no easier by his relationship with Phyllida Markahm, for whose loveliness the town is a prison in which she stays to look after an invalid and disillusioned father. Dave's love-story, at once idyllic and realistic, is the main thread of a novel presenting the problems of a tough, kindly, humorous people at a time when a strike forces crisis: a very sympathetic and convincing study of the warmth and bitterness that unite a mining community against the world outside.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Fore-edge slightly spotted, free endpapers somewhat embrowned; a little cocked. The author's first novel. "If every comfortable townsman and theorizing politician would read this book, we should hear more appreciation of what the miners really do, and fewer simple schemes for ending the coal shortage . . . Communicates to its readers that almost incommunicable something which makes a mining society completely different from other industrial centres . . . a truly powerful novel" (Sheffield Telegraph, quoted on dustwrapper flap of The Lonely Aren't Alone).