£120
SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, 8vo, pp. 531, [1]. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, colour-printed dustjacket. Dustjacket a little toned in places. Signed by Naipaul to flyleaf beneath an ink stamp: ‘Signed for a member of The New Fiction Society’ with society monogram in blue ink.
A signed copy of the fifth edition of Naipaul's 4th novel, signed for the New Fiction Society, rather perplexingly as the book had been in print for over a decade at this point. The Society, however, a sort of high-brow book club, was indeed new, having been established in September 1974 by the Arts Council to promote literary fiction. It absorbed huge subsidies without much impressing literary novelists, and John Sutherland quipped that it would have been cheaper to buy the books at full price and give them away. In this case the book is from the regular trade publication, not a book club issue, so perhaps there was a grain of truth in Sutherland's criticism.
