THE CRYING OF LOT 49 Pynchon, Thomas Literature

First Printing. Octavo (20.75cm); pale grey paper-covered boards and yellow cloth backstrip, with titles stamped in black on spine and decorations embossed onto front cover; black topstain; dustjacket; [8],9-183,[9]pp. Hint of sunning to upper board edges, lower board corners very gently tapped (though still sharp), else a fresh, Near Fine copy. In the correct first printing dustjacket, printing two blurbs on rear panel; price-clipped, with light wear to extremities, two small abrasions to lower front joint, a tiny nick to lower front flap fold, and faint foxing on verso; Very Good+. Pynchon's second book, in which, "in the guise of an increasingly absurd quest by protagonist Oedipa Maas, uncovers Pynchon's customary gigantic web of global conspiracies. The images (rock groups, Nazi psychoanalysts, drugs) essentially belong to the 1960s, but the search for the secret history of the world, paralleled in Pynchon's two other major books, V (1963) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), was to become a vital fantasy fixture in later works by John Crowley and R.A. Lafferty" (Barron, Fantasy Literature 4A-212). Mead A2a.