MAINE, Harold. If a Man Be Mad
MAINE, Harold. If a Man Be Mad. London: Gollancz. 1952. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in girl to the spine, in the dust jacket. The publisher’s retained copy with ‘archive copy’ stamp to the title page. An otherwise exceptional example, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and very gently rolled, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (15/- net) and gently rubbed along extremities, small ink ‘52’ to rear panel top corner, and some very mild marks to the yellow jacket.
A bit of a trailblazing autobiographical novel about life on both sides of alcohol recovery. Maine was a pseudonym of the American poet, Walker Winslow, and he went by the Maine name for much of his life. The loss of his father and a domineering step-father had Maine drinking heavily from his teens. He was a close friend of Henry Miller throughout his life, and Miller praised his Kerouac-like furious writing style and encouraged him to write prose. Maine endured several failed marriages, voluntarily checking himself in the rehabilitation centres across the country, including early Alcoholics Anonymous programmes. He wrote of the growing influence of Japanese tourism in Honolulu, where he lived for a while, published just a few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbour. Schizophrenia, hallucinations and psychotic episodes led him to take on a role as a ward attendant in the same psychiatric hospital which he admitted himself into, and he spent several years in this role, implementing a much more humane process of rehabilitation much-favoured by patients, but which ultimately antagonised his pseudo-professional higher-ups. Though he spent months and even years sober, bouts of binging remained a constant and he died holed up in a cheap hotel suffering from pneumonia, much to the distress of his great friend, Miller. This, his major output and a best seller, was published in 1947 in the US and the great maverick, Gollancz, snapped it up soon after. Scarce.
MAINE, Harold. If a Man Be Mad. London: Gollancz. 1952. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in girl to the spine, in the dust jacket. The publisher’s retained copy with ‘archive copy’ stamp to the title page. An otherwise exceptional example, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and very gently rolled, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (15/- net) and gently rubbed along extremities, small ink ‘52’ to rear panel top corner, and some very mild marks to the yellow jacket.
A bit of a trailblazing autobiographical novel about life on both sides of alcohol recovery. Maine was a pseudonym of the American poet, Walker Winslow, and he went by the Maine name for much of his life. The loss of his father and a domineering step-father had Maine drinking heavily from his teens. He was a close friend of Henry Miller throughout his life, and Miller praised his Kerouac-like furious writing style and encouraged him to write prose. Maine endured several failed marriages, voluntarily checking himself in the rehabilitation centres across the country, including early Alcoholics Anonymous programmes. He wrote of the growing influence of Japanese tourism in Honolulu, where he lived for a while, published just a few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbour. Schizophrenia, hallucinations and psychotic episodes led him to take on a role as a ward attendant in the same psychiatric hospital which he admitted himself into, and he spent several years in this role, implementing a much more humane process of rehabilitation much-favoured by patients, but which ultimately antagonised his pseudo-professional higher-ups. Though he spent months and even years sober, bouts of binging remained a constant and he died holed up in a cheap hotel suffering from pneumonia, much to the distress of his great friend, Miller. This, his major output and a best seller, was published in 1947 in the US and the great maverick, Gollancz, snapped it up soon after. Scarce.
MAINE, Harold. If a Man Be Mad. London: Gollancz. 1952. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in girl to the spine, in the dust jacket. The publisher’s retained copy with ‘archive copy’ stamp to the title page. An otherwise exceptional example, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and very gently rolled, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (15/- net) and gently rubbed along extremities, small ink ‘52’ to rear panel top corner, and some very mild marks to the yellow jacket.
A bit of a trailblazing autobiographical novel about life on both sides of alcohol recovery. Maine was a pseudonym of the American poet, Walker Winslow, and he went by the Maine name for much of his life. The loss of his father and a domineering step-father had Maine drinking heavily from his teens. He was a close friend of Henry Miller throughout his life, and Miller praised his Kerouac-like furious writing style and encouraged him to write prose. Maine endured several failed marriages, voluntarily checking himself in the rehabilitation centres across the country, including early Alcoholics Anonymous programmes. He wrote of the growing influence of Japanese tourism in Honolulu, where he lived for a while, published just a few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbour. Schizophrenia, hallucinations and psychotic episodes led him to take on a role as a ward attendant in the same psychiatric hospital which he admitted himself into, and he spent several years in this role, implementing a much more humane process of rehabilitation much-favoured by patients, but which ultimately antagonised his pseudo-professional higher-ups. Though he spent months and even years sober, bouts of binging remained a constant and he died holed up in a cheap hotel suffering from pneumonia, much to the distress of his great friend, Miller. This, his major output and a best seller, was published in 1947 in the US and the great maverick, Gollancz, snapped it up soon after. Scarce.