The Rack [1st Printing / 1st Edition]

Ellis, A. E. (Derek Lindsay)

Published by Heinemann, London, 1958

About this Item

1st printing of the first British hardcover edition with the scarcely found wrap-around jacket art. Navy blue cloth boards with gold titles and off-white endpapers. The corners of the boards are fairly sharp. Slight spine roll. Minor soiling is visible along the top and bottom edges of the front board. No markings by a previous owner or retailer. The page edges are tanned and foxing is apparent on the exposed page edges, the front and rear paste-downs and preliminary pages. The text is unaffected. The jacket is price intact, and the colors of the wrap-around art are bright, especially the purple background and the olive titles on the front panel. Minor darkening of the jacket's spine. There is a crescent-shaped loss to the bottom edge of the front panel, at the fore-edge. Chips are missing from the crown of the spine, and there is a closed, L-shaped tear that runs for an inch along the gutter from the crown to the bottom of the word The in the title. Two creases run horizontally across the top edge of the front panel, connecting with a shorter tear in the front fold. There is considerable foxing to the flaps, which is also visible in the white sections of the front panel, affecting the doctor's coat and the white sections of the figure on all fours. There is a neat, pin-head puncture in the front panel, under the K in Rack. Despite these blemishes, given the scarcity of this edition, this is a pleasing example. A. E. Ellis was the pseudonym of playwright Derek Lindsay (deceased), and The Rack was his only novel. From the jacket: "Paul Davenant is a young Englishman who leaves University to enter a T.B. sanatorium in the French Alps. Over two and a half years his treatment assumes the proportions of a medical marathon, and during that time he has ample leisure to observe intimately the characters and fortunes, both comic and tragic, of the other inmates, and of the doctors, capricious and absolute gods of his universe . . . The Rack, brilliantly blending farce and tragedy, describes the domestic absurdities, the heightened relationships, the fluctuations of hope and despair that make up the tubercular patient's daily horizon." And from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition: "There are certain books which we call great for want of a better term, that rise like monuments above the cemeteries of literature: Clarissa Harlowe, Great Expectations, Ulysses. The Rack, to my mind, is one of this company" --Graham Greene. Canadian buyer will be charged GST. Seller Inventory # 002453

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Rack [1st Printing / 1st Edition]

Publisher: Heinemann, London

Publication Date: 1958

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Edition: 1st Edition