Description

FINE FIRST EDITION OF DAHL’S MATILDA, INSCRIBED

DAHL, Roald. Matilda. London: Jonathan Cape, (1988). Octavo, original red cloth, original pictorial dust jacket. 

First edition, inscribed in year of publication: “Happy Birthday India, Roald Dahl 1988.”

With its publication in April 1988, Matilda won for Dahl the immediate popularity and success that had eluded his earlier children’s classics, breaking all records for a work of children’s fiction and selling over half a million paperbacks in six months in England alone. Dahl, who died of leukemia a little over two years later, always claimed that he would not have written children’s books had he not been a father, nor would he have been capable of doing so. Matilda “is a child’s vision from start to finish. Adults are capricious, ordinary things hold the seed of mystery and in really tricky spots magic will help you out? Miraculously, he creates a world where being a child does not have to be justified, but is justification in itself, where ‘marvelous things will start happening to you? and you will never again be miserable in your whole life” (Weissman). Inscribed copies of Dahl’s books are uncommon, and this inscription from the year of publication is particularly desirable. This copy in variant dust jacket without printed price and without UPC symbol. Owner signature. A fine, bright copy.