Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Toni Morrison. Tar Baby [Signed]. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Price: US$350.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. First Trade Edition, stated. Signed by Toni Morrison without inscription at front free endpaper. Octavo. 306 pp. Illustrated dust jacket with $11.95 price intact. Cream boards stamped in gilt; purple topstain. Dust jacket lightly rubbed along edges with some minor surface scratching. Boards show a touch of shelfwear and general foxing. Prior owner's signature on front pastedown, obscured by jacket flap. Binding is sound and pages unmarked. A Very Good or better copy.
Seller: Capitol Hill Books, ABAA, Washington, DC, U.S.A.
Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Price: US$350.00 + shipping
Condition: Near Fine
Description: Octavo, 306pp. Beige cloth, title in gilt on front cover and spine. Blue topstain. Stated "First Trade Edition" on copyright page. Solid text block, touch of wear to corners. In the publisher's first state dust jacket, $11.95 retail price on front flap, some shelf wear, faint sunning to spine. Signed by the author in black pen on the title page.
Seller: The First Edition Rare Books, LLC, Cincinnati, OH, U.S.A.
MORRISON, TONI. TAR BABY (SIGNED). ALFRED A KNOPF CO PUB 1981, NEW YORK NY, 1981.
Price: US$450.00 + shipping
Description: AUTHOR'S 4TH NOVEL SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR ON THE FRONT FREE ENDPAPER PUBLISHER'S ORIGINAL TAN CLOTH COVERED BOARDS WTIH GILT SPINE AND UPPER COVER TITLES, AND TOP EDGE STAINED BLUE. BOOK IS FINE WITHOUT ANY MARKS TO THE BINDING OR THE TEXT. D.J. IS ABOUT WITH SLIGHT COLOR FADE TO THE SPINE PANEL, FINE AND IS NOT PRICE-CLIPPED. A BEAUTIFUL CLEAN, BRIGHT, UNFADED COPY WITH NO REMAINDER MARK.
Seller: JOHN LUTSCHAK BOOKS, BURLINGTON, WI, U.S.A.
Toni Morrison. Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Price: US$475.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: Octavo, cream cloth lettered in gilt; unclipped dust jacket, with the slightest edgewear. First printing of the stated first trade edition, preceded by the Franklin Library limited edition. A gorgeous copy signed by Morrison on the front endpaper.
Seller: North Star Rare Books & Manuscripts, Sheffield, MA, U.S.A.
Toni Morrison. Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Price: US$475.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: Octavo, cream cloth lettered in gilt; unclipped dust jacket, with the slightest edgewear. First printing of the stated first trade edition, preceded by the Franklin Library limited edition. A superb copy signed by Morrison on the front endpaper.
Seller: North Star Rare Books & Manuscripts, Sheffield, MA, U.S.A.
Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Price: US$600.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: The Nobel Prize-winning author's fourth novel. A Franklin Library edition preceded this trade edition. First edition (stated first trade edition with no indication of later printings). A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Signed by Morrison on the front free endpaper.
Seller: Downtown Brown Books, Portland, OR, U.S.A.
Toni Morrison. TAR BABY (SIGNED FIRST EDITION). Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Price: US$600.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: Autographed SEEMINGLY UNREAD Hardcover with unclipped dust jacket in Brodart dust cover. A 1st edition/1st printing in Very Fine condition in Very Fine dust-jacket. Beautifully signed by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison on the bound-in title page. The story of a love affair between two Black Americans from very different worlds. Jadine is a black fashion model with a white patron. Son is a black fugitive who represents all she loathes and desires. Their story plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan to the deep South, examining the obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women. Simply pristine, an extremely clean and crisp copy from my personal smoke-free collection. Not a remainder or EX-LIB. A GIFT QUALITY COPY. You'll not likely find a finer copy! Delivered to you in a box, never in an envelope.
Seller: Chateau Chamberay Books, Santa Fe, NM, U.S.A.
Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. Alfred A. Knopf / A Borzoi Book, New York, 1981.
Price: US$750.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: First printing of the stated first trade edition, preceded by the Franklin Library edition. Signed by Toni Morrison directly on the front endpage. Very slight crease to top corner of the first three leaves, else book in fine condition; in a fine dust jacket. A superb copy.
Seller: Idler Fine Books, Las Vegas, NV, U.S.A.
Toni Morrison. [1st ed] Tar Baby (Inscribed). Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Price: US$1250.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: First printing of the stated first trade edition of Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison s fourth novel. Published in 1981 by Alfred A. Knopf. 8vo, hardcover with unclipped pictorial dust jacket, cream cloth lettered in gilt. Boldly inscribed on the FFE to Sybil Harriet Landau, New York City lawyer and educator involved in civil rights, feminist, and lesbian causes and lecturer on rape, sexuality and the law. Light chipping and rubbing to the dust jacket but an overall lovely copy enhanced by the inscription. From the collection of Sybil Landau.
Seller: Weinberg Modern Books, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Price: US$3500.00 + shipping
Condition: Near Fine
Description: Advance uncorrected proof of the first edition. Signed by Toni Morrison on the half-title page and inscribed to a former owner. Bound in publisher's blue wraps printed in black. Near Fine with toning to spine and light general wear. A lovely copy, scarce in this format and signed.
Seller: Burnside Rare Books, ABAA, Portland, OR, U.S.A.
Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Price: US$3500.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Format is approximately 5.875 inches and 8.5 inches. [10], 305, [5] pages. Inscribed on the fep by the author. Inscription reads To Agatha Best wishes Toni Morrison. Agatha's name and date crossed out above on the fep. DJ has wear, soiling and tears. Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved; she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her work Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored in 1996 with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people. The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years--the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife--who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them--a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant's dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian's expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art. Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian's perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret's delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him--he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege. As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward--to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them--she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him--all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart. Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power. First Trade Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing.
Seller: Ground Zero Books, Ltd., Silver Spring, MD, U.S.A.