VERTIGO (First UK edition - first impression - wrappers issue)

First impression of the first UK edition with full number-string sequence including the no. "1": 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 on the printer's page. This paperback edition was published simultaneously with a scarcer hardback edition. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. Illustrated with black and white photographs throughout the text. ***Very good in monochrome photo-illustrated card covers with integral folding French flaps, with silver titles to the spine and front cover. There are some light creases to the edges, mainly on the back cover, but the covers are clean and only lightly marked. No major creases or tears, and no reading creases to the spine. Corners sharp. No reading lean to the binding. Spine tight. There is a light abrasion to the bottom of the fore-edge of the page block, and some creasing and marking to the bottom corner of the last few pages (please see scans). No inscriptions. Apart from the aforementioned creasing and marking to the last few pages, the interior pages are clean and bright. No tears. ***210mm x150mm. 263 pages. ***Contents: I. Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet, II. All'estero, III. Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva, IV. Il ritorno in patria. ***'"Vertigo" is the book in which W. G. Sebald first employed the spell-binding blend of personal narrative, investigation, fiction, history and ravel writing that has since won him international acclaim for "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn". ***In the first of four linked narratives following the young Stendhal (at that time still Marie Henri Beyle) as he revisits the battlefields of Napoleon's Italian Campaign, Sebald announces his theme: the vertiginous unreliability of memory. In the second and third narratives, the frescoes of Pisanello, the imprisonment of Casanova in Venice, the trials of Franz Kafka in Italy, and the narrator's own uneasy journeyings, develop the theme. In the final movement, motifs sketched in the earlier parts of the book are synthesised into one mesmerising autobiographical quest as Sebald returns to his childhood roots in southern Germany to discover the dizzying otherness of his own past. ***Line by line we are drawn into a symphonic labyrinth from which escape seems impossible, until Sebald introduces his final theme: the delight the creative process takes in blending, transforming and refashioning past experience into a new and consoling whole.' (Quote taken from the front flap) ***First impression of the first UK edition of W. G. Sebald's "Vertigo", published as a paperback original (simultaneously with a scarcer hardback edition). A good reading copy of the original printing of this Sebald classic. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.…