MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS

First trade printing of this reissue of the author's first published work of fiction. Original brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the distinctive Calder dustwrapper. With the ownership name and date of James Booth, former Professor of English at the University of Hull and biographer, editor and former colleague of Philip Larkin in pencil to the front free endpaper, and a few of his lightly pencilled marginal annotations to the text. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents, except for the aforementioned annotations, clean throughout. The dustwrapper, except for some toning and a few light marks, is in very good shape indeed. Not price-clipped (35s. / £1.75 to the front flap). An attractive copy.

First published 1934, 'More Pricks than Kicks' was Beckett's first published book of prose fiction, its ten stories partly quarried from the earlier, posthumously published, novel 'A Dream of Fair to Middling Women' (1932). Beckett, content not to republish the stories, eventually relented owing to an increasing demand for them (and the increasing prices being paid for the 1934 Chatto edition). Brimming with the young writer's intellectual energy, and the influence of Joyce, the stories already display Beckett's own very particular comedy and despair.