FIRST EDITION OF THE COLLECTOR, JOHN FOWLES’ OWN COPY OF HIS FIRST PUBLISHED NOVEL

FOWLES, John. The Collector. London: Jonathan Cape, (1963). Octavo, original russet cloth, original dust jacket. $5500.

First edition of Fowles’ highly acclaimed first published novel, in scarce first-issue dust jacket, with Fowles’ signature on the title page and his blind-embossed ownership stamp to the front free endpaper.

“There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller” (New York Times). Recalling his inspiration for the novel, Fowles once said, “Some time during the 1950s, I went to see the first performance in London of a Bartok opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. It wasn’t a very good performance, but the thing that struck me was the symbolism of the man imprisoning women underground. It so happened that about a year later there was an extraordinary case, again in London, of a boy who captured a girl and imprisoned her in an air-raid shelter at the end of his garden… And eventually, it led me to the book” (Roy Newquist). Although Fowles wrote The Collector after his magnum opus The Magus, The Collector was accepted for publication first. Fowles was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. The basis for the 1965 Oscar-nominated film starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Egger. In scarce first-issue dust jacket, without reviews. The blind embossing that appears in this book carries Fowles’ name and “Lyme Regis,” the town on the English seacoast that was his final residence. Numerical ink notation above embossing.

A fine copy with exceptional provenance.