Nabokov, Vladimir ~ Lolita

FIRST UK PRINTING : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London : 1959

The First UK printing published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London in 1959. 8vo., black publisher's boards, spine lettered in silver, upper edge stained red; together in the unclipped dustwrapper designed by Eric Ayers; THE BOOK a near-Fine copy, save for light spotting to the edges of the text block; The WRAPPER also near-Fine, one of the nicest copies we have handled, with minor shelf-wear and markings, lightly creased at the edges, more-so to the spine tips; with a couple of short closed tears not exceeding 1cm in length. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First published in Paris under the Olympia Press imprint for fear of censorship, Lolita was written over a period five years, and finally completed in December 1953. Its subject matter, about a protagonist and his obsession with his landlady's 12 year old daughter, meant that it was rejected by almost all the US publishers Nabokov approached (including Viking, Simon & Schuster, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday). The resulting 1955 Paris edition was reportedly "swarming with typographical errors", but nonetheless sold out of all 5000 copies of the first printing, and by the end of the year British customs had been instructed to seize and destroy all copies entering the UK. It was subsequently banned in France, and when it did finally appear in Britain, the resulting controversy ended the political career of one of the publishing partners, Nigel Nicolson, who was at the time a Conservative MP. In an interview with the BBC in 1962, Nabokov claimed that Lolita was "a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real." That same year, it was adapted into an award-winning film by Stanley Kubrick.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Near Fine