THE BIRD'S NEST

First edition, first printing. Original dark blue paper-covered boards with a red cloth spine lettered in silver, in the Philip Grushkin designed dustwrapper. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the edges slightly rubbed and the spine tips a little softened. The contents, lightly toned to the closed text-block edge and endpapers and with the bookplate of the "Kurt Frings Agency" on the front free endpaper, are otherwise clean throughout and without previous owners' stamps or inscriptions. Complete with the good at best, rubbed, creased and chipped original dustwrapper that has split along the entire length of the rear flap fold and has a number written in pen on the bottom edge of the lower board. Not price-clipped ($3.50 on the front flap).

The author's third novel, a quietly unsettling and dryly humorous tale of a young woman with dissociative identity disorder. Jackson's most direct exploration of mental illness, a recurring theme in her work that is also vital to her novels 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' and 'Hangsaman'. The basis for the 1957 film noir drama 'Lizzie', directed by Hugo Haas and starring Eleanor Parker. The bookplate is that of Kurt Frings, a Los Angeles film agent who was active in the 1950s and 60s who represented actors such as Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, indicating that their may be some connection between Frings and the 1957 film.