The Sixties Catalogue

T h e S I X T I E S 58 True First Edition Of Plath’s The Bell Jar 56. PLATH, Sylvia, under the pseudonym LUCAS, Victoria. The Bell Jar. London, 1963. Octavo, original black paper boards, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $13,000. Click for more info First edition of Sylvia Plath’s only novel, published pseudonymously only one month before her death, her powerful exploration of a brilliant yet fragile mind, in very scarce dust jacket. With her “taut, controlled, colloquial yet poetic prose,” Plath, in her only novel, has forever recorded “the raw experience of nightmare” (Drabble; Rosenthal). Plath’s only novel would not be published under her own name until a paperback edition released in 1967. Book fine, dust jacket with a touch of wear along upper edge, tiny chip to rear panel, near-fine. A bright and lovely copy. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”