The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966.

BUKOWSKI, Charles.

Item Number: 95301

Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1988.

First edition of this collection of Bukowski’s early poems. Octavo, original pictorial boards. One of 150 copies signed by Bukowski at the colophon and hand-bound by Earle Gray with an original color screen print of Bukowski’s signature little man seated with a bottle bound in. This is number 146. Fine in the original acetate jacket which is in near fine condition.

German-American poet and novelist Charles Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels beginning in the early 1940s and continuing through the early 90s. Referred to as the "laureate of American lowlife" by Time in 1985, Bukowski's work was defined by the ambient nature of L.A. culture, addressing the experience of the ordinary poor American. Bukowski wrote in detail about his various relationships with women and alcohol, one critic described his fiction as a "detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free," an image Bukowski aspired to live up to.