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Before She Met Me

Signed first edition of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me

Julian Barnes
First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. 183, [1 (blank)]. Black linen cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket design by Craig Dodd (priced £6.50 to front flap). Published without endpapers, in a print run of 3,000 copies, with outer leaves pasted down. Originally priced at £6.50, most trade copies on the market are price-clipped and stickered with a price tag of £8.95 or £9.95.
Signed by Author to title page. Hint of rubbing to folds and edges of unclipped dustwrapper, else Fine.
Author's second novel. A tale of revenge, in which a jealous historian becomes obsessed by his second wife's past, a former bit actress.
Released in 1982, after Barnes had already published a couple of detective novels under a pseudonym, its mixture of horror and comedy aroused mixed reviews, best exemplified in Philip Larkin's response who thought it "gripping & moving" and named it one of his books of the year. In a sympathetic letter to the author, he judged it "amusing and enjoyable", "very funny, and very observant" and predicted "great success", but admitted to finding it "only half convincing" primarily because "lecturers don't meet starlets".
"An intelligent and addictive entertainment." New York Times Book Review
[Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Readers' Guides. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006]
special feature
signed
edition
first edition
format
hardback
scarcity
scarce
publisher
Jonathan Cape
published in
London
publication year
1982
ISBN
0224019856
pagination
183 pages
width × height
​0 × ​0 cm
genre
literary fiction
language
English
binding style
cloth
binding state
original binding
condition  . . .
fine
of jacket
fine
GBP£ ​225
EUR€ ​269
USD$ ​297
ref.RRY C39