Maximum City 2004 Knopf First Edition + 2 Pieces Ephemera

Hardcover in red paper-covered boards with dark cloth spine, silver spine lettering and Knopf Borzoi device, in the original photographic dust jacket retaining US and Canadian price. The copyright page states "First Edition." No subsequent-printing statement is visible, supporting this as the first U.S. edition, first printing. Contemporary bibliographic records likewise identify the 2004 Knopf hardcover as the first edition. Mehta's ambitious portrait of Bombay/Mumbai combines memoir, reportage, cultural history, and urban ethnography, moving through the city's political factions, organized crime, religious violence, police, Bollywood, dance bars, migration, poverty, and everyday street life. Mehta had left Bombay in 1977 and returned twenty-one years later; Maximum City grew from his attempt to understand both the transformed metropolis and his own relationship to it. The book became a major work of contemporary narrative nonfiction and was named a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction. The original Publishers Weekly review praised Mehta's documentary approach and placed him in the tradition of great urban chroniclers. Two pieces of contemporary/relevant ephemera are laid in and will accompany the book. The first is a clipped review of Maximum City, headed with the book's bibliographic information and a photograph of Mehta. The second is a substantial newspaper clipping, "Bombay Moves to Push Out the Poor: Slums Are Razed as Plans Envisage Reinvented City," by Rama Lakshmi, Special to The Washington Post. This is particularly appropriate accompanying material: it documents precisely the urban redevelopment, displacement, land pressure, poverty, and changing physical city that form an important part of Mehta's subject. Condition: Near Fine / Very Good+ dust jacket. Book is clean, square and firmly bound; boards remain bright, silver spine lettering strong, and interior clean and unmarked. Dust jacket is complete and unclipped, with light rubbing and handling wear, minor creasing/wrinkling along the upper edge and spine ends, and small touches of edge wear at the corners; the photographic panels remain bright and attractive. The two newspaper pieces show the expected toning, folds and irregular clipped edges and are preserved as found. This copy has an unusually strong book-design story. The jacket flap explicitly credits the striking railway-station photograph to celebrated Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, with the image supplied through Amazonas/Contact Press Images; Carol Devine Carson designed the jacket. Inside, the book itself was designed by Virginia Tan, composed by Creative Graphics of Allentown, printed and bound by Berryville Graphics in Virginia, with the Mumbai map by Design Temple. Knopf even supplies a full "Note on the Type," explaining that the text was set in Fournier, named for eighteenth-century French type designer Pierre-Simon Fournier. This unusually complete set of production credits makes the volume an excellent example of Knopf's continued attention to the physical design of the trade book.…