Signed Patricia Highsmith Books: Edith's Diary, People Who Knock on the Door and Found in the Street

As I mentioned in my post the other week on a significant (to me, if no one else) piece of signed Patriciaphernalia relating to Ripley's Game, I also have several signed Patricia Highsmith first and other editions I've been meaning to blog about for bloody ages – which, in order of publication, are as follows:

A 1977 Heinemann first edition of Edith's Diary, Highsmith's seventeenth novel. I've blogged in brief before about a previous copy of this edition, bought in 2010 in the Chichester branch of Kim's Bookshop (which, I've only just learned, closed down last year, though the Arundel branch still seemingly prospers) and subsequently sold to, I think, my friend Ric, co-proprietor of Lewes's fine (and pretty much only these days) secondhand and antiquarian bookshop Bow Windows. (And in a pleasing instance of serendipity, just the other day Ric drew my attention to Elena Gosalvez Blanca's piece about her time as Highsmith's assistant, in which Blanca highlights Edith's Diary as her favourite Highsmith.) This copy, however, is signed on the title page:

And dated 21 November 1988, a good decade on from publication. What Highsmith was up to on that particular day I couldn't say – while I own Edith's Diary, I don't own Highsmith's Her Diaries and Notebooks, if that day is even mentioned in there – but Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow suggests she might have been in America, where this copy came from. Evidently whatever she was doing included signing a book, and three years earlier, around summer 1985, Highsmith was also signing books:

Namely the first American edition of her nineteenth novel, People Who Knock on the Door, published by Penzler Books in a numbered, limited, signed edition in September 1985:

One of half a dozen of Highsmith's works published by Penzler in signed limited editions, this is another book I've blogged about before (again back in 2010) in its 1983 Heinemann first edition, when I was in the process of securing firsts of as many Highsmiths as I could. And would you believe it I've blogged about the final book I'm showcasing before too, although not this particular edition:

An uncorrected advance proof of Found in the Street, Highsmith's twenty-first novel, published in the US in 1987 (the year after the UK Heinemann first edition) by Atlantic Monthly Press, with whom Highsmith signed after Otto Penzler dropped her dedication to "the Palestinian people and their leaders" from the above-showcased US edition of People Who Knock on the Door. This one I can state with reasonable certainty when and where it was signed, as it's an association copy originally belonging to Greg Gatenby, founding artistic director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors; his ownership signature can be seen on the half-title page above Highsmith's signature:

In October 1987 Highsmith was a guest at the festival, where she was interviewed for Sight & Sound magazine by film critic Gerald Peary, who noted what a coup her appearance was. According to Andrew Wilson, on 20 October, as part of her festival duties, Highsmith read from Found in the Street at Toronto's Harbourfront – and that locale, I would hazard, is where this proof of the US edition was signed.

Patriciaphernalia: A Signed Patricia Highsmith Letter Regarding Ripley's Game

I've a number of Patricia Highsmith signed books I've been meaning to blog about for bloody ages – years in fact – but the demands of work and life have meant that my blogging activity has largely been restricted to whichever books I've written or edited myself. However, I'm hoping to make more time for Existential Ennui besides simply blogging about whichever project I'm working on – case in point being my post the other day on Patrick Gierth – and have every intention of getting to those signed Highsmiths soon (and adding them to my dedicated Patricia Highsmith page). First, though, I want to showcase something even more remarkable:

A note Highsmith wrote on 9 February, 1975, regarding her "third Tom Ripley" as she puts it – in other words, 1974's Ripley's Game. The third in Highsmith's five-book Ripliad, Ripley's Game is, as I've noted many, many times, my favourite novel, not just of hers but full stop. I've never managed to secure a signed edition – though I do own a 1974 US Knopf first with an owner inscription by James Bond/Ian Fleming biographer John Pearson – so when I saw this note offered for sale I knew I had to have it so I could pair it with my 1974 Heinemann first edition of Ripley's Game (the book which began my book-collecting odyssey).

Addressed from Highsmith's then-residence in the village of Moncourt, France, where she wrote both Ripley's Game and the next book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley (a signed US edition of which I blogged about back in 2017), the note is penned in response to a missive from one Peter Ladkin. An inveterate letter writer judging by the number of other examples of his author letters offered for sale at the same time (he also corresponded with the philosopher and LSE Professor John Watkins), Mr. Ladkin had evidently written approvingly of Ripley's Game, eliciting the following response from Highsmith:

Dear Mr Ladkin,

Don't worry about sending me the cost of return postage. I thank you very much for your remarks about my work and am glad you enjoyed my third Tom Ripley.

Yours sincerely

Patricia Highsmith

As the mention of "return postage" suggests, Mr. Ladkin had also seemingly requested Highsmith's signature and an accompanying inscription, which she duly supplied on a separate piece of paper, presumably so it could be used as a bookplate:

So there we have it: two notes regarding Ripley's Game, written from the house where Patricia Highsmith wrote that novel. Quite the pair of pieces of Patriciaphernalia for a Highsmith/Ripley's Game obsessive like myself.

A Ripley's Game Reprise: 1974 US Knopf First Edition of Patricia Highsmith's Third Tom Ripley Novel

What scant posts there have been on here of late have been to do with comics – those are, after all, what have been preoccupying me both personally and professionally over the past year or so – but I have been picking up the odd book here and there too, and among those have been a number by another perennial preoccupation of mine, Patricia Highsmith. Just the other day I came into possession of this:

An American first edition of Ripley's Game, published by Knopf in 1974, dust jacket design by Janet Halverson (whose other jackets include the 1970 and 1978 US firsts of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt and The Human Factor, and the 1981 US first of Ross Thomas's The Mordida Man). You may recall... actually at this point I doubt anyone recalls anything I've written on Existential Ennui, but anyway: Ripley's Game, the third book in the Ripliad (soon to become a TV show, with Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley – intriguing and encouraging casting there), is not only my favourite Highsmith novel, but my favourite novel full stop, and it was the acquisition of a 1974 Heinemann first a dozen years ago (in a long-since-vanished Cecil Court bookshop) that first got me into book collecting. As such, it's a totemic book for me.

I had my eye on a Knopf first six years ago, but it slipped through my fingers (as compensation I settled instead for a 1989 Heinemann Uniform Edition). The notion of getting my filthy mitts on a Knopf (ooer) has floated in and out of my head ever since then, but just the other day it seemed the fates had finally aligned when I was in Lewes's Bow Windows Bookshop and co-proprietor (and friend of mine) Ric mentioned he'd come into possession of one as part of a box of books – mostly crime fiction and spy fiction – he'd bought from a local. Or at least he thought he had: when we looked in said box, there was no sign of Ripley's Game. Bugger.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that once again the Knopf first had eluded my grasp when two days later Ric sent me a message saying he'd found it. And it turned out that not only was it a first edition (not a later printing – the Knopf edition went through a few), but it was once owned by local author John Pearson, he of James Bond: The Authorized Biography and The Life of Ian Fleming fame.

So I'm very happy with my copy (even though the dust jacket is a little battered: the sign of a well-read book, whether by Mr. Pearson or whoever it was Ric bought it off – and quite right too), not least because it affords me the opportunity to compare the US and UK first editions. The text in the Knopf edition, which was published in May of '74, a few months after the Heinemann edition, has been Americanised, or I suppose – depending on whether Highsmith, who was American, wrote the manuscript in American English – re-Americanised: within the first few sentences, there's a "parlor game" as opposed to "parlour game" in the Heinemann edition.

The Knopf has deckled edges, as is often the case with American editions, and a red-stained top block. I also rather like the jacket flap description of Tom Ripley as "energetic, amoral, overcivilized" and "undersensitized".

Now I suppose I'll have to write something abut the other Highsmith books I've picked up – especially as they're all signed.

P. M. Hubbard Short Stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1953–1969

Cult British suspense author P. M. Hubbard published just fourteen short stories in his lifetime – a smaller number even than his published novels, of which there are eighteen (including his two children's novels). Appearing in a variety of magazines and anthologies across twenty-five years, to date the stories remain uncollected, and anyone interested in reading them must seek out the original publications in which they appeared – not a straightforward task by any means (more on one aspect of why shortly), although I haven't let that deter me from getting hold of ten of them, chiefly the seven that were published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By and large that's involved strokes of good fortune in secondhand bookshops and at book fairs (notably London's Paperback & Pulp Book Fair), but for the three earliest Hubbard F&SF tales, all of which were published in the 1950s, I had to resort to downloading PDFs of the issues (from here).*

As there doesn't seem to be much online about those seven F&SF stories – apart from my own post on "The Golden Brick" that is – I thought I'd write something about them – a niche endeavour, I realise, that serves little purpose other than to interest myself and possibly Hubbard's already niche readership, but then surely that's what blogging is all about.

The first Hubbard story to appear in F&SF – and his earliest known story – was actually a reprint, having previously been published in an issue of the weekly Punch sometime in December 1952. The very short "Manuscript Found in a Vacuum" (US F&SF Vol. 5 No. 2, August 1953, cover by Jack Coggins illustrating Marion Zimmer Bradley's "The Climbing Wave") is atypical Hubbard, a wry, verbose take on vintage space opera that's mildly amusing in its own way but fairly inconsequential as regards the author's wider canon, with little evidence of the intensity of Hubbard's later work.

Much more Hubbardesque is his second short, "Botany Bay" (US F&SF Vol. 8 No. 2, February 1955, cover by Kelly Freas), which deploys his "poet's sense of concise beauty", as the story's introduction has it ("the narrow strip of tarmac reflected like water the tremendous sultry glow that lay across the tops of the hills", for example), with hints of his propensity for obliqueness and allusion ("he had a look on his face that needs describing, but isn't easy to describe – not adequately... a look of longing, a sort of shocking hunger, but so overlaid with hopelessness that the impression was one of complete passivity") in service of a story in which a motorist stops at a petrol station and encounters a victim of possible extraterrestrial interference of some kind.

Even more Hubbardian is his third short work, "Lion" (US F&SF Vol. 10 No. 3, March 1956, cover by Nicholas Solovioff illustrating Poul Anderson's "Superstition"). One of three Hubbard shorts – the others being "Special Consent" and "The House" – which might reasonably be described as dystopian or perhaps more accurately post-apocalyptic in nature – although in each case, in true Hubbard fashion, the apocalypse itself is never properly defined – it follows a regressed couple as they gather rushes in an overgrown landscape near a bronze lion statue whilst discussing their more intelligent forebears. Initially I thought that statue and the river the story locates it nearby might be one of the ones in Trafalgar Square up from the Thames, but after further investigation I believe it to be the Maiwand Lion, which stands near the River Kennet in Reading, where Hubbard was born. Anyway, Hubbard's evocative handling of the setting is typical of him, and there's a deliciously distressing twist in the tale that I shan't spoil.

The fourth Hubbard short, "The Golden Brick", I've already written about at length, but arriving at it in this essay does give me the opportunity to expand on one of the difficulties of collecting Hubbard's F&SF stories if you're based in the UK. The main source of info about Hubbard and his work is the excellent The Worlds of P. M. Hubbard, but while its bibliography does note which issues of F&SF his stories appeared in, it only gives the American numbers and dates. Here in the UK, for the first half of the 1960s a British version of F&SF was published that used the same stories as its American counterpart but not in the corresponding issues (they tended to lag behind by a number of months). So while in the US "The Golden Brick" appeared in F&SF Vol. 24 No. 1, January 1963 (cover by Ed Emsh illustrating Mack Reynolds' "Speakeasy"), in the UK it was in Vol. 4 No. 6, May 1963. In addition, in the case of "The Golden Brick", the US edition boasts a page-and-a-half introduction comparing Hubbard favourably to M. R. James and incorporating a self-penned bio ("My first novel (a thriller of sorts) just accepted for publication this autumn. Married, three children, two grandchildren. Like making things with my hands, planting and tending trees, swimming, sailing. Have cottage in Cornwall. Expect to die early in 1965, but I may crawl away over the sea yet...") that in the edited-down UK edition intro is brutally excised in its entirety.

The American intro to Hubbard's fifth short, "Special Consent" (US F&SF Vol. 24 No. 4, October 1963, cover by Chesley Bonestell), is also curtailed in the British edition (UK F&SF Vol. 5 No. 4, March 1964), although nowhere near as savagely. In this second short dystopia, Hubbard paints a scenario where women have risen to dominance after men propelled the planet back to the stone age by unleashing "the Fire". There are some interesting ideas present, but the gabby exposition – not a typical Hubbard trait – and the officious nature of the matriarchal society depicted seem to me somehow off.

A more familiar and authentic slice of Hubbard comes with his sixth short, "The Shepherd of Esdon Pen" (US F&SF Vol. 26 No. 2, February 1964, cover by Jack Guagham illustrating S. S. Johnson's "The House by the Crab Apple Tree"/UK F&SF Vol. 5 No. 7, June 1964), in which Hubbard spends a good deal of the story's length vividly establishing the ancient chalk upland surroundings and the social and religious milieu in order to deliver a tale of escalating dread centring on the eponymous horn-headed pagan herder, a carving of whom can be seen in the local church and whose serpent-like staff figures at the story's climax.

Just as good is "The House", Hubbard's ninth short story overall and his last to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (US F&SF Vol. 36 No. 4, April 1969, cover by Bert Tanner illustrating Gregory Benford's "Deeper Than the Darkness"). The third Hubbard post-apocalyptic tale, it shares with "The Shepherd of Esdon Pen" a kind of excavatory epilogue, as a man and his wife try to erect a home and start a new life on their government-allotted square mile of overgrown rubble – all that remains of North London – but find that the going is far harder than they expected. Transplanting a characteristically Hubbardian sense of a sullen rurality to a keenly rendered shattered cityscape ("fairly fine rubble, pretty wet in winter and thickly grown with scrub and the larger annuals, broken by coppices of hazel and alder"), the accruing details – the scarcity of glass, silent birds that might be deaf, the backbreaking work of shifting by hand the "infernal jigsaw" of masonry to find "a reasonably stable and compact surface" to fill in and then level up – build into a convincing portrait of English stoicism in the face of catastrophe.

Of the seven F&SF stories, I would say "Lion", "The Golden Brick", "The Shepherd of Esdon Pen" and "The House" are all approaching prime Hubbard and are well worth tracking down; the other three perhaps less so. In addition, F&SF ran three Hubbard poems, and these too are worth a read (again, they can be downloaded here). Both "Free Flight" (US F&SF Vol. 10 No. 4, April 1956, cover by Chesley Bonestell) and "Air Space Violated" (US F&SF Vol. 15 No. 5, November 1958, cover by Pederson) deal to a degree with man's efforts to escape his earthly shackles, but my favourite I think is "Nobody Hunts Witches" (US F&SF Vol. 8 No. 5, May 1955, cover by Stanley Meltzoff). It brought a smile to my face when I first read it, and in that spirit I hope I'll be forgiven for including it in full below.

*A year on from this post, I secured physical copies of all three in the basement of the Quinto Bookshop on Charing Cross Road.

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 1/12/17.

The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories by Patricia Highsmith: Signed First Edition

Two years ago I wrote about Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith and Eleven, Highsmith's first collection of short stories, published by Heinemann in 1970. I hadn't expected to return to Eleven; as well as exploring in that post Highsmith and Greene's mutual admiration and the foreword he wrote for the book, I also reviewed the best stories contained therein, so there wasn't really much more I could have added. But then I went and bought this:

the American first edition of the collection, published by Doubleday in 1970 under the title The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, with a dust jacket designed by Tim Lewis, and, well, here we are. There are no significant differences between the Heinemann and Doubleday editions – both contain the same eleven short stories; both boast the Graham Greene foreword (although it's titled 'Introduction' in the American edition) – so there's no excuse, really, for my buying the US first edition when I already owned the UK first edition... except that this copy of the US first edition is signed:

Curiously, it's also an ex-library copy, liberated from, according to the indented stamp on the title page, the Westbrook Memorial Library in Maine (I think; it's hard to make out and the library docket that was affixed to the rear endpaper has been removed). I'm guessing that's the Walker Memorial Library. The signature looks genuine to me, but I am intrigued as to the circumstances by which Highsmith signed a library book. Was it signed after it was removed from the library? Or while it resided in the library, during a reading or event of some kind – or perhaps even covertly during an incognito visit by Highsmith...? I don't suppose I'll ever know.

At least, that's what I figured when I first posted this. But then an hour or two later Book Glutton emailed me and drew my attention to this 2015 obituary for Bonny Muir. As Book Glutton noted, Muir was a good friend of Patricia Highsmith's who at one time lived in Portland, Maine, not far from Westbrook. An avid user of the South Portland Library, it's conceivable Muir frequented the Walker Memorial Library too, and that she acquired this copy of The Snail-Watcher there and got Highsmith to sign it at a later date. Then, when Muir died, her books were sold. Conjecture, of course, but it's plausible, and certainly excellent detective work on the part of Book Glutton.

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 20/1/17.

Sarah Gainham, Time Right Deadly (Arthur Barker, 1956 / 1957)

No. 10 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do. NB: linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 6/6/16.

What is it?
The 1957 Arthur Barker Dragon paperback edition of Sarah Gainham's debut novel, Time Right Deadly, originally published in hardback by Barker in 1956.

Who illustrated the cover?
Haven't the foggiest.

Where and when did I buy it?
Online, four years ago.

Why did I buy it?
As I mentioned in this 'books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly' post, I'm interested in Sarah Gainham's early spy novels – not least because she herself was a spy – and Time Right Deadly is the earliest of those early spy novels, being, as it is, her debut. It's also extremely uncommon in British first, hence why I bought this paperback rather than a first edition... although during the course of drafting this post I noticed, whilst double-checking online that it is still uncommon in first, a first edition for sale, modestly priced, and best of all still in its splendid John Dugan-designed dust jacket. (The scant few other British firsts I've seen for sale online have been sans jackets.) Naturally I snapped it up.

Have I read it yet?
No.

Will I be updating this post as soon as I have that aforementioned first edition in my clammy hands?
You bet I will.

Et voila:

The 1956 Arthur Barker first edition of Time Right Deadly, dust jacket design by John Dugan (said dust jacket now added to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s). Best of all, the back of the wrapper boasts a photograph of Gainham – only the second one I've ever come across.

Pity Him Afterwards By Donald E. Westlake (T. V. Boardman, 1965, Bloodhound Mystery #499): Westlake Score and Review

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 4/9/15.

It may not have been a banner year thus far for book blogging chez Louis XIV/Existential Ennui – and certainly not at The Violent World of Parker, where, this post included, I've managed just two posts this year; some co-blogger, huh? – but it's been a bloody good year for book collecting. I've had three books at the top of my wants list for the past four years (and more like five or six years in the case of two of them), and one by one, over the past few months, I've managed to cross them all off. First came a 1957 Cresset Press edition of Patricia Highsmith's classic The Talented Mr. Ripley (albeit sans dust jacket, compensated for by the addition of a facsimile jacket); then a 1965 Michael Joseph edition of perhaps P. M. Hubbard's finest novel, A Hive of Glass (albeit an ex-library copy, compensated for the additional acquisition of an uncorrected proof of said); and now this:

Pity Him Afterwards, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1965 (the year after the US Random House edition). The fifth of Donald E. Westlake's novels to be published under his own name, until a fortnight ago (when I won this copy on eBay, for seventeen quid), Pity Him Afterwards was the only one of the eight Westlakes in total published by Boardman that I didn't own. Doubtless that will mean little to most folk, even those with an enthusiasm for Westlake, but book collectors with an interest in crime fiction (or indeed longtime readers of Existential Ennui) will surely understand how collectable – and how uncommon and elusive – the Boardman Bloodhound Mysteries (of which Pity Him Afterwards is no. 499) can be.

A big part of that collectability is their dust jackets, almost all of which were designed by Denis McLoughlin, a body of work which comprises around 550 wrappers. (The Bloodhound wrappers are just one strand of McLoughlin's wider body of work; he designed another two or three hundred covers for Boardman besides and drew countless comics both for that publisher and for IPC and DC Thomson.) And of the seven jackets he designed for Westlake novels (the wrapper design for the final Westlake published by Boardman, The Spy in the Ointment, was taken from the US edition), Pity Him Afterwards is, I think, the best: arresting, dramatic, darkly evocative.

That the novel itself doesn't match up to its terrific cover is bit of a shame, because in truth it's not a patch on the earlier likes of The Mercenaries, Killing Time, Killy and especially 361. Parts of it are quite good – it's set in and around a summer stock theatre (a favourite motif of Westlake's; see also the pseudonymous sleaze novel Backstage Love and its two sequels and the Parker character Alan Grofield, whose background is in summer stock), and the passages dealing with the day-to-day running of said are surprisingly interesting and convincingly done. The problems come in the ludicrous characterisation of "the madman", the murderous escapee from a mental institution who drives the plot and who, preposterously, manages to get a job as an actor at the theatre (and then starts killing his coworkers). He's an utterly unbelievable creation, and the novel suffers whenever he assumes the role of point-of-view character.

Still, there's some decent characterisation elsewhere in the novel, notably in the shape of Eric Sondgard, captain of the Cartier Isle (where the theatre is located) police department during the summer months and humanities professor at a Connecticut college for the remainder of the year – a believably unassuming chap whose self-doubt almost causes him to hand off the case to the state police more than once but who through diligence and dogged determination eventually wins through. And then there's the whodunnit aspect of the book – Westlake deliberately obfuscates which of the actors the madman has assumed the identity of – which despite my general disinterest in such guessing games I must admit did, well, keep me guessing.

More importantly from my perspective, however, this copy of the Boardman edition of Pity Him Afterwards completes my set of Westlake Boardmans, so in that regards it's a thing to be prized. And particularly so in that dust jacket, which, though a little shabby, is presentable enough to take its rightful place in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.

P. M. Hubbard, A Hive of Glass: First Edition (Michael Joseph, 1965), Uncorrected Proof (Michael Joseph, 1964)

One would be forgiven for thinking in the internet age that pretty much any edition of any old book a book-collecting body might desire would be (fairly readily) available online, if only said book-collecting body had sufficient funds. In fact some books still prove stubbornly elusive, irrespective of cost. I've been on the lookout for a 1965 British first edition of A Hive of Glass, perhaps the finest novel in cult crime/suspense writer P. M. Hubbard's queasily compelling canon, ever since Book Glutton got me into Hubbard's work four years ago, and though the occasional jacketless copy has hoved into view, a first edition in its wrapper has, until very recently, remained frustratingly out of reach. This has been especially maddening because there haven't even been any images of the British first's jacket available online, so I had no idea even what the thing looked like – an inexcusable state of affairs for a novel that I would consider to be among the ten best that I've read in the past half-dozen years.

Happily, I'm finally able to rectify that situation:

That there is the British first edition and first impression of A Hive of Glass, published by Michael Joseph in 1965 and purchased by me just last week. It's an ex-library copy:

but both book and jacket are in very good condition (despite having been borrowed from a Kesteven county library twenty-nine times over a five year period), with all pages (and indeed library dockets) present and correct and the wrapper quite bright and unclipped.

That wrapper, now added to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, was designed by Ivan Lapper, an artist and illustrator whose best-known book jacket work is probably the 1966 Bodley Head edition of Graham Greene's The Comedians but who has latterly found wider fame as a painter. Those familiar with A Hive of Glass will recognise the curious object on the front of the jacket as a Venetian tazza (albeit one with the embellishment of a lid); those unfamiliar with the novel and wondering what the bloody hell a tazza is and why it should feature on the cover will just have to go and read the book (or maybe my review – or better still John Norris's).

There is more to this particular tale of book collecting, however; because not only have I at long last laid my hands on possibly the scarcest book in Hubbard's backlist, I've also laid my hands on something which, I'd hazard, is scarcer still:

An uncorrected proof of A Hive of Glass. I've only ever come across one other proof of a Hubbard novel – 1964's A Picture of Millie, still listed on AbeBooks (for about £100) as I type – so this one is rather a rare thing indeed. (And I should just like to state for the record, for those who are au fait with the novel, that no murders were committed in the acquisition of this item.) What's really interesting about it, aside from the little errors one expects to find in proof copies –

compare page 17 of the proof (top) with that of the first edition (bottom; click on the images to see them larger) – is its copyright page. The stamped date on the card cover gives the pub date as 11 January, 1965 (and the price, scrawled in pen, as 18 shillings, as per the first edition's jacket flap); but on the copyright page, the year of publication (and copyright date) is given as 1964:

Whereas on the copyright page of the first edition, the year of publication (and copyright date) is given as 1965:

In a way I suppose that's fair enough: the uncorrected proof was indeed 'published' – in the sense that it was printed and distributed (in presumably a very small edition) – in 1964, whereas the first edition wasn't published – in the sense of being made available for sale to the public – until the following year. But it's not something I think I've seen before with a proof and a finished edition, and it does lend some credence to the notion that an uncorrected proof is the true first edition of any book. Which, at least in this case, it's hard to argue that it isn't.