THE BOOSTER.

First edition. Signed by the author. Publisher's original stapled yellow card covers printed in black. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm, the covers a little toned at the edges and spine. The contents are clean throughout. Housed in a bespoke black morocco chemise with titles in gilt to the spine and black cloth slipcase. The second of four issues of this scarce avant-garde literary magazine.

Signed by Henry Miller in black ink on the upper cover. Like many American writers in Paris before the advent of the computer, Henry Miller landed his first job in the city as a proofreader at the Herald Tribune, hoping that something better would come along to kick-start his literary career. In 1937, Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell became co-editors of a golfing magazine called The Booster. They were granted complete editorial freedom, provided they devoted two pages of each issue to news from the American Golf and Country Club. Seizing the opportunity, they transformed what had been a conventional country club sports and social bulletin into an outlandish, surreal vehicle for experimental writing. In a letter soliciting lifetime subscriptions at 500 francs each, Miller declared that the editors intended to "boost, baste and lambast when and wherever possible. Mostly we shall boost. We like to boost, and of course to begin with we are going to boost ourselves. In general we are for things. But in our own cute way. We will publish poems, essays, serious articles, witticisms, philosophy or metaphysics, travel and diary notes, fragments, unfinished novels, rejected manuscripts, and... the ripe and cheesy things which have been lying in trunks for years". The magazine also boasted a wonderfully eccentric masthead: managing editor, Alfred Perles; society editor, Anaïs Nin; sports editor, Charles Nordon (Lawrence Durrell); butter news editor, Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis, Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor, the Earl of Selvage (Henry Miller); and literary editors, Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan. As Mary Dearborn observes in her chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller's Paris address, "most of the editors were appointed without first being consulted: Saroyan, for example, claimed never to have met Miller in Paris". Yet Miller's appointment as fashion editor, comic though it appeared, reflected genuine expertise. Dearborn notes that he possessed "not inconsiderable knowledge about the subject, gleaned from his early years as a tailor's son and his stint in Heinrich's shop. Although he wore used clothes and corduroys in his Paris years, he maintained a keen appreciation for fine fabrics and an eye for a good cut". The editorial coup proved short-lived. By the fourth issue, the American Golf and Country Club's traditional advertisers, alarmed by the magazine's increasingly subversive and eccentric content, had withdrawn their support, prompting club officials to threaten the editors with legal action. The magazine was promptly renamed 'Delta', at Durrell's suggestion, and survived for only three more issues before finally folding.