Description

“AS ONCE UPON A TIME THEY WERE”: PREFERRED FIRST ENGLISH EDITION—FIRST CLOTHBOUND EDITION—OF JOHN CROWLEY’S “IMAGINATIVE MASTERPIECE,”
WARMLY INSCRIBED AT LENGTH BY HIM WITH A QUOTE FROM THE NOVEL,
A BEAUTIFUL COPY

CROWLEY, John. Little, Big. London: Victor Gollancz, 1982. Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket.

Preferred first English edition and first hardcover cloth edition, “the best book of its kind since Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland” (Harold Bloom), Crowley’s breakthrough work inscribed by him on the title page with his novel’s closing lines, “Never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember any can be, as once upon a time they were.” With Little, Big, praised by Ursula Le Guin as a work that “calls for a redefinition of fantasy,” John Crowley has created “a kind of summae theologica of modern fantasy” (Clute & Grant, 238). To critic Harold Bloom, “Little, Big seems to me the best book of its kind since Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Like the Alice books, Little, Big is an imaginative masterpiece, in which the sense of wonder never subsides? As miraculous as Shakespeare? it is as if the book had always been there? as though John Crowley found it, and brought it home with him and to us.” Preferred first English edition—the scarce first clothbound edition—published simultaneous with first paperbound English edition; preceded by first American edition, issued in wrappers only, 1981. “Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and World Fantasy Awards” (Barron 7-85). See Pringle 86.

A fine copy, quite scarce inscribed.