Mittelhölzer, Edgar ~ A Morning at the Office

First UK Printing : The Hogarth Press, London : 1950

8vo., green cloth gilt to spine, upper edge green; complete in the striking pictorial dust wrapper featuring an image by T. Ritchie; THE BOOK with slight lean to text block; Holliday Bookshop sticker to the rear paste-down; previous owner’s stamp to front free endpaper ‘Please return to James K. Feibleman’; a very good copy, otherwise, in the unusually bright DUST WRAPPER which has some even toning and small nicks and chips to head and foot of spine; a couple of light scratches to the lower panel, which has one small closed tear to head (no more than 2 cm in length). The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition. Considered by some to be the most prolific novelist of the Caribbean, Edgar Mittelhӧlzer was born in Guyana in 1909, and published his first work Creole Chips in 1937, but it was not until 1941, when Corentyne Thunder found a UK publisher in Eyre and Spottiswoode that he found a wide and receptive audience for his writing. Due to his typing job at the British Council, he was able to forge a series of friendships and professional relationships with some of England’s greatest literary figures, including Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press who first published this, A Morning at the Office, in 1950. The novel was controversial for its depictions of varying characters; set in a Trinidadian office, it included Chinese, East Indian and Black Trinidadians, as well as a sympathetic portrayal of a gay man. Mittelhӧlzer was opposed to the Colonial Guyanese Government from a young age, and these themes resurface in the novel, which focuses on Colonialism colourism and classism. A lovely copy.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Very Good