COOPER, Duff. Operation Heartbreak. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. 1950. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket and the scarce Book Society Fiction Choice bellyband with high praise quoted from Compton Mackenzie. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and perhaps just very trivially rolled. The contents clean and fine but for one or two singular spots to text. The dust jacket unclipped (8s 6d net) and complete, mild bumps to extremities but a bright and very pleasing example. The wraparound band with repair around spine joint, slightly bumped, but scarce nevertheless.
Much-maligned Willie Maryngton was too young to fight in the First World War and is too old to fight in the Second. Confronted with this sheepish tragedy, he eventually plays his own part in the eponymous ‘Operation Heartbreak’ and indeed the Allied victory. Based on true events, Cooper’s short and poignant domestic novel centres on the British naval intelligence strategy to conceal from the Germans preparations to invade Sicily in 1943—’Operation Mincemeat’. On these grounds, the British government tried and failed to block its publication, but the first printing is scarce hence. It remains Cooper’s only novel, and was reprinted by Persephone Books in 2004.
COOPER, Duff. Operation Heartbreak. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. 1950. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket and the scarce Book Society Fiction Choice bellyband with high praise quoted from Compton Mackenzie. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and perhaps just very trivially rolled. The contents clean and fine but for one or two singular spots to text. The dust jacket unclipped (8s 6d net) and complete, mild bumps to extremities but a bright and very pleasing example. The wraparound band with repair around spine joint, slightly bumped, but scarce nevertheless.
Much-maligned Willie Maryngton was too young to fight in the First World War and is too old to fight in the Second. Confronted with this sheepish tragedy, he eventually plays his own part in the eponymous ‘Operation Heartbreak’ and indeed the Allied victory. Based on true events, Cooper’s short and poignant domestic novel centres on the British naval intelligence strategy to conceal from the Germans preparations to invade Sicily in 1943—’Operation Mincemeat’. On these grounds, the British government tried and failed to block its publication, but the first printing is scarce hence. It remains Cooper’s only novel, and was reprinted by Persephone Books in 2004.
