To Kill a Mockingbird
LEE, Harper
Publisher: J. B. Lippincott Company
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Date: 1961
Binding: Octavo, original quarter bound green cloth with brown paper boards and brown stamped lettering on spine.
Edition: FIRST EDITION
Printing: 12th Printing
Description:
First Edition, Twelfth Impression of Harper Lee's first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Presenting exceptionally well in its original matching Dust Jacket with "Twelfth Printing" on the front inside flap. A very nice example.
Published by J.B. Lippincott Co. in 1960, the book became an almost immediate bestseller, winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It remains one of the best-loved classics of all time. It has been translated into more than forty languages, selling more than forty-million copies worldwide. Because Harper Lee had never published a book before, the publisher only printed an estimated first printing run of 5,000 copies, many of which went to public libraries, where they put the usual library marks on them. Due to the fact that it was such a sensational hit, nearly every early printing was well-read, which means that finding one with a matching dust jacket is becoming more and more rare. This iconic cover of a tree in autumn designed by Shirley Smith was printed on a type of photographic paper, which unfortunately shows every nick and crease and often is found quite sun-faded to the spine, where it often gets the most wear.
Condition:
Binding tight and square. One-quarter bound cloth with paper sides present clean and unmarked with only some light age-toning to edges of cloth. No other remarkable wear externally except for a faint mark to top text block. No BCE stamp to rear board. Internally clean and unmarked but for gift inscription neatly penned to top of front endpaper. Original "Twelfth Printing" dust jacket presents well with bright front panel showing a few scratches and minimal toning to rear. Moderate wear to edges and chipping to corners with a bit of loss. Creasing near edges throughout. Chipping to head and foot of spine with a bit of loss at hinge corners. Hinges moderately to heavily worn. Some shelf-wear to rear panel with a couple very faint stains. Bump to bottom rear edge. Moderate wear to front crease. Flaps clean but lightly toned. Price clipped. "Twelfth Printing" stated. A very nice example.
A Classic:
A classic work considered by many to be amongst the best, including The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, Deliverance by James Dickey, Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Falconer by John Cheever, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Others include titles such as, A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Light in August by William Faulkner, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Loving by Henry Green, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Money by Martin Amis, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Native Son by Richard Wright, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.
Even further, those recognize as the best of the best include The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, Possession by A.S. Byatt, The Power and the Glory by Graham Green, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Ubik by Philip K. Dick, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, White Noise by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.