The Magus
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1965. First Edition. Hardcover. 1st edition, preceding the invariably overpriced London edition by 4 months. Fine in a fine dustjacket, the book is as tight as the rivets and seals on a new submarine, the jacket is brighter than optimism. Magus 1st editions that are not fine, or misdescribed as fine, are everywhere and if you want 20 copies by nightfall, no problem. Fine ones are not, and with modern books, the quantity of worn ones makes the glory of fine ones, like the blood of soldiers makes the glory of generals. What we have here is quality and value together, the pairing that most irritates the booksellers who most deserve to be irritated. Ex–Harry Cohn Jr. (1946–1991) who, secretly and quietly, sparked, centered, and guided the 1960s cultural uprising. He was a surpassingly smart guy, perilously handsome, visionary, worldly, magnetic, kind, and always invisible, partly freed up to be so because he was indecently financed as the heir to his father’s Columbia Pictures fortune. Fine / fine. Item #790
Contrarily, Fowles was a 1950s guy, locked in a 1950s mentality, and warped past sympathy by simplistic biases and an ill–fitting affair with existentialism, but he could really write, and even better, he could really rewrite. He worked on The Magus for 12 years, a postmodern metafiction, published at the dawn of an idealist social revolt that Fowles never saw coming. But the book’s performance mysticism and escalating tension were taken up by the flower power legions anyway, and in exactly the way that Fowles intended, except for one thing. He drew his Nicholas as an everyman, but the ’60s generation saw Nicholas as an idiot and enjoyed being confirmed in their belief that idiots never get satisfaction.
Price:
$250.00