WALLACE, David Foster [Peter Matthiessen] [Steve Snider and Biz Stone].
Infinite Jest: A Novel.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.
$12,000.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152259
+$500
First Edition Of The Authors Magnum Opus Infinite Jest; Signed by David Foster Wallace and Twice by Jacket Designer Steve Snider and Co-Founder of Twitter Biz Stone, From the Library of Paris Review Co-Founder Peter Matthiessen
First edition of the author's magnum opus from the library of fellow novelist Peter Matthiessen. Thick octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed and dated in the year of publication by the author on the title page, "David Foster Wallace 2/96." Additionally signed twice by dust jacket designer Steve Snider on the front panel and rear jacket flap and twice by his junior designer, and co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone on the front panel and rear panel beneath the famed 'Vollman' typo. Steve Snider designed the dust jacket for Infinite Jest while serving as art director at Little, Brown. His junior designer, Biz Stone, prepared the production mechanicals and inadvertently misspelled novelist William T. Vollmann's name as "Vollman" on the rear panel. The error escaped notice and is now the identifying issue point for the first state jacket. Snider first met Stone when he was seventeen and, regarding him almost as a son, later brought him to Little, Brown where Stone apprenticed under him for two years, developing the computer and design skills that would shape the course of his career. Stone would go on to co-found Twitter, making this otherwise minor production error an unusual point of intersection between one of the most celebrated novels of its generation and a figure who would help reshape digital communication. From the library of Peter Matthiessen with his bookplate to the front free endpaper. Peter Matthiessen remains the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard) and fiction (Shadow Country). In addition to his literary achievements, he was a co-founder of The Paris Review in 1953, a landmark literary magazine that became renowned for publishing emerging writers and for its influential “Art of Fiction” interview series, which featured major figures such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and T.S. Eliot, and helped shape modern literary discourse. The magazine also played a key role in introducing new voices to a wider audience and has received numerous literary honors over the decades. More than 70 years after its founding in 1953, The Paris Review is still a major, ongoing literary magazine with new issues and contemporary contributors, now published by the Paris Review Foundation. A prominent environmental activist, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008 at the age of 81 for Shadow Country. As critic Michael Dirda observed, “No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea.” Very good in a very good first state dust jacket with Vollmann misspelled on the back panel. Damp staining to the final 130 pages and soiling to the jacket. Jacket design by Steve Snider. From the library of Peter Matthiessen.
In 2004, Chad Harbach declared that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." In a 2008 retrospective by The New York Times, Infinite Jest was described as "a masterpiece thats also a monster nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric." Time Magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
Infinite Jest: A Novel.
$12,000.00
In Stock






