Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (The Collector's Library of Famous Editions)
Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1978. Gay, Zhenya. Reissue. Full-Leather. Good / No Jacket. Item #2354500
Stain on top edge affecting top margin of endpapers and first and last few pages but not text, a few blemishes on boards. Binding tight and square.
ix, [1], 77 pp. Burgundy full leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, ribbon marker bound in. Introduction by William Bolitho. Twelve gravures by Zhenya Gay. In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.
Price: $25.00