TOM WOLFE FIRST EDITIONS AT
ASH RARE BOOKS
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London : Jonathan Cape, (1966). First British edition. Wolfe’s first collection – twenty-two essays and half a dozen caricatures. An entirely new voice in journalism skyrockets metaphors, neologisms, hip-talk and learned reference into the pursuit of the form and style of the new. Includes “The Fifth Beatle”, “The First Tycoon of Teen”, “The Last American Hero”, “The Girl of the Year”, “The Nanny Mafia”, “A Sunday Kind of Love”, “The Woman Who Has Everything”, “Why Doormen Hate Volkswagens”, etc. First published in New York the previous year, but here in the period-defining dust-jacket by Jonathan Miller.
Post 8vo (21cm). (xviii),(340),[iv]pp. Original pink boards, blocked and lettered in gilt; mild tanning of edges, but a very good copy in the dust-jacket – a touch sunned, with some very minor edge-wear and a single short tear, but also very good.

£100

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London : Michael Joseph, (1971). First British edition. Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” in an essay for “New York” magazine in June 1970. It had already struck a chord before the essay (in augmented form) appeared in book form on either side of the Atlantic — “Political extremism is all the rage in these days of radical chic — just as it was when the bored children of the middle class, reacting against their background, helped the radical leftists Mussolini and Hitler into dictatorial power”, noted the Illustrated London News on 31st October 1970. Wolfe’s second essay illuminates in similar vein the San Francisco poverty programmes — “the smell of singed snobbery, roasted radicals and charred chic ascends with blissful delight” (Alexander Walker in the Birmingham Daily Post, 23rd October 1971).
Post 8vo (21cm). [vi],(154)pp. Original black boards, lettered in gilt; a couple of spots, but a very good copy in the Graham Rogers dust-jacket, also very good.

£75

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New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, (1981). First edition. Wolfe on modern architecture – smart, well-researched, and devastating – “Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement parts wholesale distribution warehouse ... Every new $900,000 summer house ... has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery”, etc.
Post 8vo (21cm). [x],(144),[vi]pp. Illustrations. Original cloth; a very good copy indeed in the Kiyoshi Kanai dust-jacket – also very good indeed.

£75

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