THEMERSON, Stefan.
Half title. White printed d.w., unclipped; a little marked, rubbed & chipped, rear panel v. sl. scuffed. Presentation inscription 'For Michael from Stefan May 1967' on initial blank. Although described on the jacket as perhaps Themerson's 'first "conventional" novel', this is a deeply strange work, in which the narrator obsessively trails the sinister, elusive, and protean Tom Harris. In its themes of paranoia and pursuit, the novel's debt to French writers, such as Celine, Robbe-Grillet, and Queneau (whom Themerson published) is clear.
HOBAN, Russell.
FIRST EDITION. Half title. Orig. black cloth. Red, white & black printed d.w., clipped. A lovely bright copy. Hoban's novel of a post-apocalyptic Kent, set 2,000 years after a nuclear war, sees iron-age level societies fighting for scraps of knowledge, technology, and language. What survives of culture is a bizarre (but utterly believable) melange of Punch and Judy shows, the life of St Eustace, and nuclear myth. Written in a weird Chaucerian English drawn from his experiences as a teacher in Kent and his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania, Hoban alleged that it destroyed his ability to spell - words are mangled, degraded, and re-formed. An astonishing feat of imagination. Anthony Burgess said that while it 'could not expect to be popular. it seems to me a permanent contribution to literature'.