Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith: Signed and Inscribed First Edition (Heinemann, 1977)

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Let's return to the signed editions again (after a Richard Stark cover gallery) with a book which is among my most prized signed novels – up there with the signed US first edition of P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil (with its accompanying letter – and not forgetting that special copy of the UK first as well); the signed and inscribed (to Byrne Fone) UK first of Donald E. Westlake's debut novel, The Mercenaries; the signed and inscribed (to his friends) UK firsts of Gavin Lyall's Blame the Dead and Spy's Honour (and a signed Lyall letter, too); and those signed and inscribed (to me!) UK and US firsts of Anthony Price's The Labyrinth Makers, The Alamut Ambush and Our Man in Camelot. (Phew.) All of those books share in common personal inscriptions from their authors, an attribute that, to my mind, makes them more interesting, and therefore more special, than just a regular signed edition, and such is also the case with this book:

A British first edition of Patricia Highsmith's Little Tales of Misogyny, published by Heinemann in 1977. It's a collection of (very) short, amusing, dark and disturbing stories in which a procession of women meet sticky ends at the hands of of a variety of men and, indeed, themselves. It's all deliciously, delightfully evil, and Olman posted a pithy review of it a couple of years ago (and there's a longer one by Cory Pung here which is also worth a read).

I saw this particular copy on AbeBooks (having already bought the same edition previously in Much Ado Books in Alfriston a few years ago; I know, I know... there's a long and complicated story surrounding why I went looking for another copy – I was actually looking for signed Highsmith novels in general having been stiffed on eBay – but I shan't bore you with the details), and the listing caught my eye. It stated that there was an inscription inside the book, but it was a little uncertain if said inscription was by Patricia Highsmith or not. I asked a question or two of the seller, and then decided to take a punt, as it was only a fiver. Turns out that it was indeed inscribed by Highsmith, and also boasts a little drawing (demonstrating a smidgeon of the talent she must have at one time deployed as a comics creator):

The inscription reads:

"With New Year's greetings to Champak and Amrit from Pat – with love – 29 Dec. 1977 (sour reading – for sweet spirits)"

Who Champak and Amrit are/were I haven't been able to determine; I checked my copy of Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow, but to no avail, and I don't have Joan Schenkar's more recent biog; if anyone reading this does, and is willing to have a butcher's at its index, let me know if you have any luck.

Patricia Highsmith is, as I've stated more than once, one of my favourite authors – especially her five Tom Ripley novels (see here for a graph representing my appreciation of them) – so to own an evidently fondly inscribed (and illustrated!) book like this one is quite a thrill. There are roughly eighty or so signed Highsmith editions listed on AbeBooks, but many of those are the limited-to-250-copies editions produced by Otto Penzler's Mysterious Books in the late-1970s and 1980s – a 1986 American edition of Little Tales of Misogyny among them. Prior to that Highsmith did sign the odd book, but not too many, and this is the only non-Penzler signed copy of Little Tales of Misogyny I've seen. Not bad for five quid, then.

And I'll be staying with Highsmith for the next few posts, with some intriguing editions of a couple of the Ripley books I've come into possession of, and some thoughts thereon...

Richard Stark's Parker Novels: UK Coronet First Editions (Plus Some Reprints), 1967–1970

NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.

Right then. There'll be another signed edition along soon enough, this one bearing a lovely personal inscription – and even a little drawing – from one of my favourite authors. But before we get to that, last week I posted a Westlake Score – a 1969 Hodder Fawcett/Coronet paperback of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novel The Sour Lemon Score – which, for me, completed a run of British first editions of the Parkers – i.e. those editions Coronet published in the UK in the late-1960s before switching to the "bullet hole" style of cover design. And since I now have all of those – plus a couple of reprints – I reckon it's time for a Parker/Coronet cover gallery.

I'm arranging the covers in order of original publication (a publication order which did, in fact, follow Coronet's American counterpart company Fawcett/Gold Medal's order), even though that means The Split breaks up the nice run of illustrated covers. Hey – don't blame me: blame Coronet; you can always grab the images and rearrange them to your heart's content. And by the way, a few of these covers haven't yet made it into the Violent World of Parker cover galleries, so this may be the first time some VWoP regulars have set eyes on them. Click on the covers to enlarge, and enjoy.

Point Blank, Coronet, 1967; original US publication 1962 (as The Hunter)

The Rare Coin Score, Coronet, 1968; original US publication 1967

The Green Eagle Score, Coronet, 1968; original US publication 1967

The Split, Coronet, 1969; original US publication 1966

The Black Ice Score, Coronet, 1969; original US publication 1968

The Sour Lemon Score, Coronet, 1969; original US publication 1969

Point Blank (second impression), Coronet, 1970

The Rare Coin Score (second impression), Coronet, 1970

New Beautiful British Book Covers: Most Unnatural Murder by Fiona Sinclair; A Spy in the Hand by Henry Talbot; Death in the Lebanon by John Tyndall

Time, I think, for some more Beautiful British Book Jacket Design. The addition of Victor Reinganum's wrapper for John Wain's Nuncle and Other Stories to the BBBJD gallery on Friday brought the number of dust jackets on the page up to 87, which, let's face it, is no kind of number to leave the total at. So I've now added a further three jackets to take it up to 90 – getting ever closer to the magic 100 – all of which wrap books I bought on a visit to secondhand bookshop Dim and Distant in Heathfield, East Sussex, and all of which were created by designers already represented in the gallery. Let's take a look at 'em in order of publication, shall we?

Most Unnatural Murder by Fiona Sinclair, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1965. The dust jacket on this one was designed by Donald Green, and to my mind it's every bit as good as his distinctive wrappers for C. S. Forester's The General, Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon and P. M. Hubbard's The Tower. For her part, Sinclair is an overlooked but intriguing author: she wrote a series of crime novels starring Superintendent Paul Grainger and one or two standalone works – Most Unnatural Murder being one. Many of her books were published posthumously, Sinclair having died at a fairly young age in 1961; Most Unnatural Murder was apparently found among her papers after her death.

Next:

A Spy in the Hand by Henry Talbot, published by Robert Hale in 1966. There aren't many photographic covers in the Beautiful British Book Jackets gallery, but this one is worth including, I think, for a couple of reasons: it's nicely balanced – typographically simple but effective – and it was put together by a designer of whom I'm a great admirer and who's much better known for his illustrative covers: Val Biro. I was surprised when I saw Val's name listed as jacket designer on the front flap, but I've since discovered that he designed other photographic wrappers besides this one; David Schutte, Val's agent, thinks that possibly the photographs were supplied by the publisher and Val simply arranged the typography, but I must admit the other covers I've seen are quite similar, so I wonder if Val did in fact take the photos himself.

The author of this one, Henry Talbot, is even more obscure than Fiona Sinclair. There's very little information about him online and A Spy in the Hand is, I believe, his only novel under that name, but as Henry Talbot Rothwell and H. T. Rothwell he seems to have written a handful of other espionage thrillers for Hale in the mid- to late-1960s, including Exit a Spy (1966), Duet for Three Spies (1967) and No Honour Amongst Spies (1969). Of course, I might have got my wires crossed there, so do let me know if you happen have any further information on Talbot/Rothwell.

Finally:

Death in the Lebanon by John Tyndall, published by Geoffrey Bles. Now, this one actually dates from 1971, which should, by all rights, put it beyond the remit of Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s. But its dust jacket was designed by Cecil Walter Bacon, who I wrote about in this post on P. M. Hubbard's Cold Waters, and whose work, I'd suggest, owes more to the approach to dust jacket design in the '50s and '60s than it does to that of the '70s. Plus Bacon's wrapper for Death in the Lebanon is a splendid piece of design and illustration, and it's my gallery and I'll include it if I want to, so ner.

As for the author of Death in the Lebanon, John Tyndall, again there's practically nothing about him online. He seems to have written just two novels – this one and Death in the Jordan (1970), which also stars the lead of Death in the Lebanon, detective Roger Turnbull. However, there is quite a famous John Tydnall – the onetime leader of the National Front and founder of the British National Party – and on his Wikipedia page Death in the Lebanon is listed as one of his published works. Of course, Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable of resources, so that could just be a mistake – and as commenter C points out below, it seems fairly unlikely. But if anyone can confirm or deny one way or the other, do please drop me a line or leave a comment.

Anyway, I'm aiming to get the Beautiful British Book Jacket gallery up to 100 covers over the course of the next month or so, so stay tuned for further additions. But I've some book covers of a different order lined up for the next post: a gallery of the British paperback first edition covers for Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker crime novels in the late-1960s...

Nuncle and Other Stories by John Wain (Macmillan, 1960): Signed Edition; Lewes Book Bargain; Victor Reinganum Cover Design

This next signed – and inscribed – edition is also a Lewes Book Bargain, as I bought it in the Lewes branch of Oxfam just the other week. Moreover, its dust jacket is, I reckon, splendid enough to join the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – and it's on that jacket that the signature and inscription appears, rather than inside the book itself...

John Wain's Nuncle and Other Stories was first published in hardback in the UK by Macmillan in 1960, although this copy is, in fact, the second impression, issued in the same month (November) as the first printing. Wain, whose profile has, er, waned in recent years, was a poet and critic as well as a novelist, and a friend and contemporary of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, with whom he was associated in The Movement. He was also linked, like Amis, to the Angry Young Men, although neither author really fitted that bill. Reading some of the stories in Nuncle, Amis was the writer who most readily sprang to (my) mind, even before I'd learned of their association; Wain shares in common with Amis a similar wit and a preoccupation – at least with the early Amis – with campus life, and a willingness to twist the knife: the opening story, "Master Richard", about a toddler burdened with adult consciousness, is a gleefully maleficent tale leavened by a late-dawning humanity that in turn leads to a bleak ending. That said, Amis is, I think, the better writer – but then as far as I'm concerned there are few writers as stylish and elegant as Kingsley Amis, so that's really not much of a criticism.

This copy of Nuncle has been inscribed by Wain on the front flap of the dust jacket; you can see part of that inscription above, but here it is in full:

Evidently the book was sent as a Christmas gift (no idea to whom, though; possibly someone living in or around Lewes, given that that's where I found it); Wain hasn't signed his surname in the inscription, but I knew it was his hand because he's also inscribed it from "Eirian and William" – Eirian being Eirian James, his second wife – he was married three times – and William being, I believe, the eldest of his three sons, all of whom came from his second marriage.

The dust jacket design on this Macmillan edition isn't credited, but it is signed: "Reinganum", alias Victor Reinganum, a British abstract painter, designer and illustrator who was linked to Surrealism and who helped guide the style of the Radio Times for forty years. His design for Nuncle is, I think, exemplary, and it's now joined the other covers on the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design page. Speaking of which, and seeing as Nuncle brings the total number of covers on the page up to 87, I thought I'd add a few more jackets to bring it up to a nice round 90, all of them by designers who already have examples on the page, and all wrapping books I bought from secondhand bookshop Dim and Distant in Heathfield, East Sussex. And I'll be unveiling those covers in the next post...

Westlake Score: The Sour Lemon Score by Richard Stark (Coronet UK First Edition Paperback, 1969)

NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog. Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Interrupting the seemingly interminable signed editions and ephemera, here's a Westlake Score which, for me, completes a particular run of Westlake's Richard Stark-written Parker crime novels:

It's the British first edition of The Sour Lemon Score, the twelfth Parker outing, published in paperback by Coronet Books/Hodder Fawcett in 1969 – the same year as the US Fawcett/Gold Medal first edition. This edition is the fourth of a run of four Coronet printings of the Parkers – which, you'll doubtless recall from this post, followed the Gold Medal printing order in the late-1960s (Coronet and Gold Medal being two wings of the same international publishing company) – which all sport the same (uncredited, sadly) style of cover design and art: white backgrounds coupled with colourful but minimalist illustrations. The Sour Lemon Score was the only one of those four – the others being The Rare Coin Score (Parker #9), The Green Eagle Score (Parker #10) and The Black Ice Score (Parker #11) – that I was still missing, until I chanced across this copy online the other week; you don't often see these pre-"bullet hole" cover design printings of the UK Parkers, so I was pleased to come across it.

And its acquisition means that I do now, I believe, own all of the paperbacks of the Parker novels Coronet issued in the UK before they switched to that aforementioned "bullet hole" design in the 1970s. So how about, for the next Violent World of Parker/Existential Ennui cross-post, a gallery of all of the Coronet Parkers from 1967 (when Point Blank debuted in the UK) to 1970 – including some little-seen reprints...? Ahead of that though, next on Existential Ennui it's time for another signed edition... which is also a Lewes Book Bargain... and boasts a Beautiful British Book Jacket to boot...

Memo from Macmillan Publisher Alan Maclean to Chairman (and Former Prime Minister) Harold Macmillan Concerning P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil (1974); plus Review of the Novel

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

That mouthful of a title up top should give you a pretty good idea of what we're dealing with in this latest post on signed editions (and ephemera), but further explication is, I suspect, warranted...

This is the British first edition of cult suspense novelist P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil, published by Macmillan in 1974. Now, those of you with reasonable memories might recall my having blogged about this book before, albeit in a different edition: a 1974 US Atheneum first edition, to be precise, signed by P. M. Hubbard and inscribed to his friend, the author Alan Kennington, making it the only signed Hubbard book I've ever seen. That copy of the book came with its own remarkable bit of ephemera: a signed, handwritten letter by Hubbard to Kennington about the novel, which, one might reason, together with the signed edition would be quite enough for any Hubbard enthusiast. But I later spotted this Macmillan edition online and then went to take a look at it at the seller's bookshop, and simply couldn't resist it and the ephemera that was stapled to its front free endpaper.

I'll return to that in a moment, but first, the novel itself. As is often the way with the books I buy, I hadn't read A Thirsty Evil when I originally wrote about it, but I have since, and it is, as the late Wyatt James dryly notes in his annotated bibliography, "a characteristic book by this author". It certainly reminded me of Hubbard's clammy masterpiece A Hive of Glass (1965), although A Thirsty Evil isn't quite of that calibre; overall it's less oppressive, though still with that intensifying aura of dread, the juxtaposition of a rural idyll – in this case centred on a remote pool hiding a submerged, totemic tooth-like stone – with a sense of there being something very wrong in this summer sun-drenched English backwater.

Hubbard's protagonists are often unpleasant fellows, and the narrator of this one, novelist (and heir to a biscuit empire) Ian Mackellar, is a man who is, at root, as feckless as his nemesis, Charlie, the mentally disturbed brother of Julia, the woman Mackellar is obsessed with; it's evident early on that matters won't end well, and so it proves. But the getting there is grotesquely gripping – the tense scenes where Mackellar encounters Charlie and Julia's other sister, Beth, are especially memorable – and both Wyatt James, who labelled the book "not outstanding", and indeed Hubbard himself, who, in his letter to Kennington about the book, stated, "it's not one I'm very keen on myself", were, I think, doing A Thirsty Evil a disservice: it's a short, taut, unnerving little triumph.

The dust jacket illustration on the Macmillan edition of A Thirsty Evil is by well-known children's illustrator (and onetime tutor at Brighton College of Art) Justin Todd, and it's that image which prompted the writing, on 4 February, 1974, of the piece of paraphernalia stapled to the front free endpaper of this particular copy:

It's an internal Macmillan memo, from the then-publisher, Alan Maclean – brother, incidentally, of Cambridge spy Donald Maclean (who recently made a cameo in spy novelist Jeremy Duns's The Moscow Option) – to Macmillan's then-chairman: one Harold Macmillan, prime minister, from 1957 to 1963, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You see, after retiring from politics in 1964, Macmillan rejoined his family's publishing firm (he'd been a junior partner from 1920–1940), this time as Chairman – and if this document is anything to go by, it seems he was quite an active one...

Maclean's memo is apparently a response to a note from Harold Macmillan, who was evidently far from keen on Justin Todd's Henri Rousseau-esque jacket artwork for A Thirsty Evil. Maclean's defence of the design choice runs thus: "All the jackets for [Macmillan editor] George Hardinge's list are aimed particularly at the 'thriller' market, and this one has been very well received in the trade. The Australian company ordered 250 copies on the strength of the jacket alone!" After reasoning that the illustration "is not entirely irrelevant", Maclean signs off by saying that he's returning Macmillan's own copy of the book – presumably the very copy seen in this post.

And then, at the bottom of the memo, comes something quite extraordinary: a handwritten note by Harold Macmillan, signed "HM", with a "thank you" to Maclean, followed by the exclamation, "Oh God! Oh Montreal!" On first inspection those words might appear slightly baffling – they did to me, anyway – but it's actually a reference to English novelist and satirist Samuel Butler's "A Psalm of Montreal", a commentary on what Butler perceived as the Canadian propensity to embrace financial matters above artistic ones, as embodied by the fate of a plaster cast of the classical Greek sculpture Discobolus (epitome, appropriately enough in the wake of London 2012, of the Olympic spirit) on the premises of the Montreal Natural History Society. Essentially, Macmillan was bewailing the justification of what he thought was a rubbish cover by the book's advance sales.

As remarkable as this document is, there are a couple of things about it which, to my mind, make it even more so. For one, Harold Macmillan clearly read and enjoyed A Thirsty Evil, which strikes me as being, at the very least, notable: a former prime minister was a "fan" of P. M. Hubbard (there's one for the blurbs on the forthcoming Murder Room ebook reissues of Hubbard's novels). For another – and this is priceless – it looks to me as if Macmillan actually corrected Maclean's original note when he acknowledged receipt! Maclean misspelt "douanier" – as in Le Douanier, Henri Rousseau's nickname – as "douanaie", which Macmillan – it appears to be in his hand and his slightly darker blue pen, not Maclean's – has in turn amended, crossing out the additional "a" and adding an "r" at the end!

To be honest, I'm not sure if the bookseller I bought this from quite knew what he had on his hands – I paid a fair amount for it, but not much more than you'd have to pay for a decent Macmillan first edition of A Thirsty Evil anyway (like most of Hubbard's novels, it's become quite quite uncommon in first). In any case, I shall treasure this just as much as my signed Atheneum edition and accompanying Hubbard letter – and as a bonus, you all get to see it as well.

Next: we're leaving the signed editions for the moment for a Westlake Score...