BUCK, Pearl S. The Mother. London: Methuen. 1934. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the fabulous dust jacket designed by Vasco Lazzolo. A very good book, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and gently rolled, with some sporadic foxing to the textblock edges. The contents with heavy foxing to prelims clearing up after ten pages or so, and largely fine thereafter barring some occasional spots to margins. The dust jacket unclipped (7/6 net) with several small nicks and chips to the spine tips and corners, edges gently rubbed with some closed tears. Curiously, an original cutting of the front flap blurb has been placed on to the flap, makeshifted by the publishers, we presume. A terrific copy overall.
One of Buck’s most well-regarded novels—despite her own self-doubts and reluctance to publish it—written shortly after the completion of her magnum opus, The Good Earth. Like much of her work, fiction or non-fiction, it sheds light on a world unknown to many western readers, and within that world, a marginalised sector of it. It follows an unnamed peasant woman, a mother, in pre-1911 China as she overcomes adversity in all respects. The dust jacket, a vivid design by the artist, Vasco Lazzolo, represents one of only a small handful of commissions he completed, each of them as vibrant and illuminating as the next. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and what little of his work has appeared on the market tends to be traditional albeit excellent portraiture. His dust jacket commissions, however, intimate an artist unshackled by form and norm. Scarce.
BUCK, Pearl S. The Mother. London: Methuen. 1934. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the fabulous dust jacket designed by Vasco Lazzolo. A very good book, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and gently rolled, with some sporadic foxing to the textblock edges. The contents with heavy foxing to prelims clearing up after ten pages or so, and largely fine thereafter barring some occasional spots to margins. The dust jacket unclipped (7/6 net) with several small nicks and chips to the spine tips and corners, edges gently rubbed with some closed tears. Curiously, an original cutting of the front flap blurb has been placed on to the flap, makeshifted by the publishers, we presume. A terrific copy overall.
One of Buck’s most well-regarded novels—despite her own self-doubts and reluctance to publish it—written shortly after the completion of her magnum opus, The Good Earth. Like much of her work, fiction or non-fiction, it sheds light on a world unknown to many western readers, and within that world, a marginalised sector of it. It follows an unnamed peasant woman, a mother, in pre-1911 China as she overcomes adversity in all respects. The dust jacket, a vivid design by the artist, Vasco Lazzolo, represents one of only a small handful of commissions he completed, each of them as vibrant and illuminating as the next. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and what little of his work has appeared on the market tends to be traditional albeit excellent portraiture. His dust jacket commissions, however, intimate an artist unshackled by form and norm. Scarce.
