Lolita.

NABOKOV, Vladimir.

Item Number: 121875

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955.

First American edition and first trade edition of Nabokov’s masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page on the day of publication, “For Jason and Barbara from Vladimir August 18, 1958” and with a drawing by Nabokov of a butterfly. The recipient Jason Epstein was Nabokov’s Doubleday editor and an early supporter of the novel. Having published Nabokov’s Pnin at Doubleday in 1957, Epstein encouraged the house to publish Lolita to no avail (four American publishers refused to publish the work) but was successful in printing the first appearance of the novel in America, a long excerpt in the June 1957 issue of Doubleday’s Anchor Review. G.P. Putnam’s published the sensational book in America the following summer and it became the first novel since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. Inscribed copies of both the 1955 Paris first edition and this 1958 first American edition are equally scarce due to Nabokov’s refusal to sign copies. Vera Nabokov noted this in a letter accompanying a signed copy of the 1958 edition to Anita Loos, that her husband “has been autographing Lolita only for personal friends and the very few writers whose work he admires. He has refused his autograph to so many of his own students and to so many of his acquaintances that it would be impossible for him to make an exception… ” (Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-77, ed. D. Nabokov and M. J. Bruccoli, p. 265. Also: Tock, Emily. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and Jason Epstein: A Study in Authorial Extravagance and Editorial Restraint in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Volume 48, Issue 4, July 2017, pp. 268-281). Photograph of Nabokov by Maclean Dameron. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional association.

One of the most celebrated books in history, Nabokov's Lolita quickly attained classic status upon publication in 1955. Notable for its controversial subject, the novel was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne in addition to several adaptations for stage. "Lolita blazes with a perversity of a most original kind. For Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce. Lolita seems an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy" (Atlantic Monthly).