The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon 1966 - J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia New York - First Edition The first edition in which Pynchon, the man who turned paranoia into a literary style, plays with us....

‘Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating….Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what else besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about....Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.’

‘The comedy crackles, the puns pop the satire explodes.’ –
New York Times.
  Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pynchon is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics.

Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963),
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being reclusive; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s. [Ted Gioia - Postmodern Mystery]

Provenance: Bookshop label of Savile Book Shop, Washington’ to front free endpaper.

Octavo (book size 21x13.5cm), pp. 183 [9]. In publisher’s yellow backed grey cloth boards, spine lettered in black and ‘w.a.s.t.e.’ symbol in blind to front board, top edge tinted grey, brown endpapers with w.a.s.t.e. printed on them in darker brown. Dust jacket priced ‘$3.95’ to lower corner of front flap.
  Condition: Near fine, toning along top edge, and uneven fading to top-stain, in near fine dust jacket, toning to rear panel, and rubbing to spine ends.   Ref: 110819   Price: HK$ 7,000