Firestarter
KING, Stephen
Publisher: The Viking Press
Location: New York, NY
Date: 1980
Binding: Octavo, quarter bound burnt orange cloth with black paper sides; gold gilt stamped initials to front and title to spine.
Edition: FIRST EDITION
Printing: 1st Printing
Description:
First Edition, First Printing of Firestarter, Stephen King's science-fiction thriller. A nice example presenting in its original dust jacket.
"I like to scare people," said Stephen King. "I like to go for the jugular" (New York Times). "Rooted in the topical realities of the notorious CIA drug experiments… Firestarter has the nitty-gritty reality we've come to expect of King," fulfilling "John D. MacDonald's prediction that King would get away from writing books about 'spooks and spells and slitherings in the cellar" (Leiber in Fear Itself, 111-12). Preceded only by a signed limited edition published in the same year. Basis for the 1984 film starring Drew Barrymore. Underwood & Miller, 254. Horror Literature 4-131.
Condition:
Binding tight with moderate slant. Original one-quarter bound cloth with paper sides present nearly clean and unmarked with only a few faint blemishes and scratches. Rubbing to creases with a bit of loss. Corners and edges show light wear. Same to head and foot of spine with some age-toning to edges. Moderate spotting to text-blocks. Internally clean and unmarked but for light spotting to pastedowns and endpapers. Dust jacket presents well. Rubbing and light stains to front and rear panels, more so to rear. Mild chipping to corners but for rear bottom, which shows heavier chipping with about one-half by one-quarter inch of loss. Moderate chipping to head and foot of spine with a bit of loss and some creasing. Light staining and scratches to spine. Edges age-toned throughout with some small, mostly closed tears. Rubbing to hinges with some darkening. Flaps clean with age-toning to edges. Crease at bottom front flap and tiny chip to top edge of rear. Original price of $13.95 not clipped. A 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.