COMFORT, Alex. The Almond Tree. London: Chapman and Hall. 1942. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s orange cloth lettered in green to the spine, in the marvellous dust jacket designed by M. Levetus. A very good copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and square, the rear joint slightly cracked but holding very well. The textblock edges gently spotted, the contents with some sporadic foxing to prelims and small Foyles label to front pastedown beneath front flap. The dust jacket price-clipped, complete, slightly spotted to the rear panel, the spine panel very slightly toned, but a bright example overall.
A very early novel by the polymath, Comfort, who remains known, if at all, for his albatross, the best-selling The Joy of Sex (1972) which overshadows both his literary output and his personal achievements and motivations—he was a conscientious objector, working as a doctor throughout the war all the while pamphleteering for pacifism. He was arrested alongside Bertrand Russell for organising an anti-nuclear sit-in at Trafalgar Square, and lived his entire life with an unwavering commitment to anarchism. This novel published a year after his debut novel, No Such Liberty (1941), this one dubbed by the publishers a poet’s novel, a sort of cyclical allegorical romance which follows a Polish family whose death of the grandfather releases the grandchildren from their First World War German habitation, each of them going their individual ways—in war, in romance, some in death—and each winding spiritually and/or physically back to this ethereal locale, the eponymous almond tree. Uncommon.
COMFORT, Alex. The Almond Tree. London: Chapman and Hall. 1942. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s orange cloth lettered in green to the spine, in the marvellous dust jacket designed by M. Levetus. A very good copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and square, the rear joint slightly cracked but holding very well. The textblock edges gently spotted, the contents with some sporadic foxing to prelims and small Foyles label to front pastedown beneath front flap. The dust jacket price-clipped, complete, slightly spotted to the rear panel, the spine panel very slightly toned, but a bright example overall.
A very early novel by the polymath, Comfort, who remains known, if at all, for his albatross, the best-selling The Joy of Sex (1972) which overshadows both his literary output and his personal achievements and motivations—he was a conscientious objector, working as a doctor throughout the war all the while pamphleteering for pacifism. He was arrested alongside Bertrand Russell for organising an anti-nuclear sit-in at Trafalgar Square, and lived his entire life with an unwavering commitment to anarchism. This novel published a year after his debut novel, No Such Liberty (1941), this one dubbed by the publishers a poet’s novel, a sort of cyclical allegorical romance which follows a Polish family whose death of the grandfather releases the grandchildren from their First World War German habitation, each of them going their individual ways—in war, in romance, some in death—and each winding spiritually and/or physically back to this ethereal locale, the eponymous almond tree. Uncommon.
