Description

“PERHAPS THE GREATEST ROMANTIC SUSPENSE NOVEL EVER WRITTEN”:
FIRST EDITION OF REBECCA, INSCRIBED BY DAPHNE DU MAURIER, MOST RARE INSCRIBED

DU MAURIER, Daphne. Rebecca. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition of du Maurier’s best and most famous novel, inscribed on the title page, “To Rolland L. Comstock, With best wishes from Daphne du Maurier, 1988,” this famed Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone mystery was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1940 Hitchcock film with Laurence Olivier. Rare inscribed.

“‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.’ The opening line of perhaps the greatest romantic suspense novel ever written has become as familiar to readers as ‘Call me Ishmael’ from Moby-Dick” (Penzler, Crown, 26). Rebecca has been singled out by Haycraft Queen as a Cornerstone mystery, and chosen by Mystery Writers of America as number nine in the Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time. The novel proved to critics that “Du Maurier is in a class by herself” (New York Times); her “masterful treatment” of the Gothic tale “made Rebecca a classic book? by far the best known of du Maurier’s work” (Steinbrunner & Penzler, 136). For the Oscar-winning adaptation by Hitchcock in 1940, in which “the film like the novel is wonderfully tense,” Hays Office censors “demanded removal of the novel’s heart—the fact that Maxim (Laurence Olivier) has murdered Rebecca—so that he would not go unpunished for a crime” (Tibbetts & Welsh, 347). Hubin, 128. Reilly, 510. From the estate of famous bibliophile Rolland Comstock, whose murder in 2007 remains unsolved. Comstock’s collection of modern firsts was featured in Nicholas Basbanes’ second book Patience and Fortitude (2001).

Text generally fresh and clean, light edge-wear to near-fine book; expert restoration to lightly toned dust jacket.