KESEY, Ken. Sometimes a Great Notion. London: Methuen. 1966. 8vo. First British edition, first printing. Publisher’s slate grey cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket. A very good copy. The cloth clean and bright, very gently pushed at extremities. The binding tight and square, though read. Some small and faint spots to the textblock edges, with some occasional light foxing to the prelims and terminals, with brief ink ownership signature to front pastedown, else fine. The dust jacket price-clipped, gently nicked at corners and tips with one small closed tear to spine head. Laminate just lifting slightly at front joint, but a very presentable example overall.
A smart copy of the scarce British edition of what is often considered Kesey’s magnum opus—it’s what he called it—despite his considerably wider acclaim for his earlier novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), immortalised via Miloš Forman’s film of the same name (1975). A familial epic in the East of Eden or One Hundred Years of Solitude sense, it follows with ‘fierce provincialism’ the Stamper family of loggers in Oregon and the historic strike which comes to define them in being, place, and time. The New York Herald Tribune aptly called it ‘a towering redwood’ of such fiction. This British edition, published two years after the American first, is considerably scarcer than its counterpart.
KESEY, Ken. Sometimes a Great Notion. London: Methuen. 1966. 8vo. First British edition, first printing. Publisher’s slate grey cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket. A very good copy. The cloth clean and bright, very gently pushed at extremities. The binding tight and square, though read. Some small and faint spots to the textblock edges, with some occasional light foxing to the prelims and terminals, with brief ink ownership signature to front pastedown, else fine. The dust jacket price-clipped, gently nicked at corners and tips with one small closed tear to spine head. Laminate just lifting slightly at front joint, but a very presentable example overall.
A smart copy of the scarce British edition of what is often considered Kesey’s magnum opus—it’s what he called it—despite his considerably wider acclaim for his earlier novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), immortalised via Miloš Forman’s film of the same name (1975). A familial epic in the East of Eden or One Hundred Years of Solitude sense, it follows with ‘fierce provincialism’ the Stamper family of loggers in Oregon and the historic strike which comes to define them in being, place, and time. The New York Herald Tribune aptly called it ‘a towering redwood’ of such fiction. This British edition, published two years after the American first, is considerably scarcer than its counterpart.
