BARTH, John. The Sot-Weed Factor. London: Secker and Warburg. 1961. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in silver gilt to the spine panel, in the excellent wraparound dust jacket designed by Owen Wood. A good copy, the cloth clean, gently bumped along the corners and spine tips, the binding tight and square. The textblock slightly toned, with some offsetting and mild spots to the endpapers and half-title, then generally fine. The dust jacket unclipped (30s net), laminated (as usual), rubbed along the spine tips and corners with some associated creases and indentations, all of which is somewhat obscured by the busy jacket design.
Maybe the signature postmodernist satirical novel, a sprawling 806pp late 17th-century tragi-comic novel journeying from London and Cambridge to Maryland and the New World, to that ultimate position, a sot-weed factor—a tobacco estate manager. Like much of the fatboy pomo novels of this period, dense at times, especially for the classics-deprived, with winks, nods and secret handshakes to Cervantes, Boccaccio, Sterne, Rabelais, and on and on and…
BARTH, John. The Sot-Weed Factor. London: Secker and Warburg. 1961. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in silver gilt to the spine panel, in the excellent wraparound dust jacket designed by Owen Wood. A good copy, the cloth clean, gently bumped along the corners and spine tips, the binding tight and square. The textblock slightly toned, with some offsetting and mild spots to the endpapers and half-title, then generally fine. The dust jacket unclipped (30s net), laminated (as usual), rubbed along the spine tips and corners with some associated creases and indentations, all of which is somewhat obscured by the busy jacket design.
Maybe the signature postmodernist satirical novel, a sprawling 806pp late 17th-century tragi-comic novel journeying from London and Cambridge to Maryland and the New World, to that ultimate position, a sot-weed factor—a tobacco estate manager. Like much of the fatboy pomo novels of this period, dense at times, especially for the classics-deprived, with winks, nods and secret handshakes to Cervantes, Boccaccio, Sterne, Rabelais, and on and on and…
