Greene, Graham. A Burnt-Out Case. Heinemann, 1961.

Price: US$700.00 + shipping

Condition: Near Fine

Description: London: Heinemann, 1961. First edition. Faint spotting to the front panel of the volume; jacket is very good plus with light edgewear and soiling to the rear panel. Price-clipped. Green has signed on a plate which is affixed to the title page.

Seller: Paul Johnson Fine Books, IOBA, Temecula, CA, U.S.A.

GREENE, Graham.. A Burnt-Out Case.. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1961, 1961.

Price: US$3215.93 + shipping

Description: First edition in English, first impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Toola, with love from Graham". In common with other Greene titles of this period, the Swedish, Norwegian, and French translations of this novel were all published prior to the English edition, all in 1960, with the Swedish version, Ütbrand, accepted as the true first edition. Miller A40a. Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in silver, publisher's device to rear cover in blind. With dust jacket. Binding fresh, extremities rubbed with one small mark to head of front cover, gutter cracked at half-title, but firm, contents clean; jacket lightly rubbed and toned, else bright and unclipped: a very good copy in very good jacket.

Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom

Greene, Graham. A Burnt-Out Case.. Heinemann, London, 1961.

Price: US$4000.00 + shipping

Description: First edition of this Greene novel set in a leproserie on the upper reaches of a tributary of the Congo River in Africa. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, "For Anthony Hobson from Graham Greene." The recipient Anthony Hobson, auctioneer and book collector, was a director at Sotheby’s and friend of Greene's. He successfully organized the sale of the Greene's manuscripts at Sotheby’s in 1964. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Dust jacket design by Lacey Everett. Greene dedicated A Burnt-Out Case to Docteur Michel Lechat, a medical doctor at a leper colony in Yonda in Africa (one of a number of such colonies Greene had visited in the Congo and the Cameroons, which had inspired his novel). In his dedication to Lechat, Greene writes: "Doctor Colin has borrowed from you his experience of leprosy and nothing else. Doctor Colin's leproserie is not your leproserie. From the fathers of your Mission I have stolen the Superior's cheroots--that is all, and from your Bishop the boat that he was so generous as to lend me for a journey up the Ruki." In reference to the characters in the novel, Greene writes: "It would be a waste of time for anyone to try to identify Querry, the Ryckers, Parkinson, Father Thomas--they are formed from the floatsum of thirty years as a novelist." Commenting on his literary intentions in the work, Greene wrote that it was, "an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief, in the kind of setting, removed from world-politics and house-hold-preoccupations, where such differences are felt acutely and find expression." Drawing a comparison between a leper-colony doctor's work and that of a novelist, Greene adds: "A doctor is not immune from 'the long despair of doing nothing well", the same "cafard that hangs around a writer's life."

Seller: Raptis Rare Books, Palm Beach, FL, U.S.A.