LOLITA

First UK edition, first printing. Publisher's original black cloth with silver titles to the spine, in the Eric Ayers designed dustwrapper. Top edge red. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm with some bumping to the bottom of the spine, the cloth bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamp. The fore-edge of the closed text block with just a handful of tiny foxing spots, the red top edge a little faded. Complete with the very good, lightly rubbed and creased dustwrapper that has several short closed tears (without loss), a few marks to the rear panel and just a hint of fading to the spine. Not price-clipped (21s net to the front flap).

Nabokov completed 'Lolita' in December of 1953; it had taken five years to write. He correctly predicted that the novel's content would cause a stir and the novel was indeed rejected by every UK and US publisher who looked at it. It was eventually issued by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press in Paris (Samuel Beckett had recently published 'Watt' with Girodias), appearing in September 1955 across a pair of the distinctive green Olympia paperbacks, 'Lolita' received little attention until Graham Greene singled out the novel in the Sunday Times as one of the three best books of 1955. Owing to the subsequent legal wranglings, however, 'Lolita' had to wait until 1958 for its first US publication (it was an immediate bestseller, for all the wrong reasons), and another year before appearing in the UK.