I, Said the Demon (signed)

BAXT, George. I, Said the Demon (inscribed) London: Jonathan Cape. 1969. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s purple cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the spectacular wraparound dust jacket designed by Stanley Chapman. This copy signed and inscribed by the author ‘to Betsy and Karl’, who must surely have been contemporary celebrities given Baxt’s vast array of show-business friends. A near fine copy, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and just a trifle rolled, the topstain bright and vivid, the contents fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped, Cape-cut, some mild toning but a lovely, vibrant example. The author’s intriguing detective mystery, the second in a trilogy of similarly colourful novels following unlikely lovers, Sylvia Plotkin and Max van Larsen. Baxt is perhaps best remembered for his character Pharoah Love, the first gay detective which spawned five novels, or merely for his purely idiosyncratic self; openly gay from ma young age, he was a natural rebel, a meddler, inventive and enigmatic, supremely confident, with a supposedly encyclopaedic knowledge of film and their stars—his best friend his VCR, he said. He wrote for just about every medium, and much of his work, be it film, television, theatre, or books, was very well-received, though he is sadly and unduly little remembered today. The dust jacket designer, Stanley Chapman, formed a part of a group of talented designers and illustrators that took up the mantle of Hans Tisdall after publishers Cape sought fresh ideas. Other members of this group included Bill Botten, Craig Dodd, Leigh Taylor, and a few others. Chapman produced the least of these, but all are thrilling and sickly-sweet.…