Black Book: An Agnon.

DURRELL, Lawrence.

Item Number: 127562

Paris: The Obelisk Press, 1938.

First edition, first issue of the first volume in the Villa Seurat Series. Octavo, original wrappers. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat in Paris to meet Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Together with Alfred Perles, Nin, Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding their own literary movement. Their projects included The Shame of the Morning and the Booster, a country club house organ that the Villa Seurat group appropriated for their own artistic . . . ends." They also started the Villa Seurat Series in order to publish Durrell's Black Book, Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes, and Nin's Winter of Artifice. Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press served as publisher. "This is a wild, passionate, brilliantly gaudy and flamboyant extravaganza; it is intrinsically and essentially, the book of a young man – Durrell was 24 when he wrote it – richly obscene, energetically morbid, very often very funny indeed, self-pitying, but, above all, stylistically and verbally inventive as no other young man's novel of the period was even attempting to be" (Philip Toynbee, The Observer).