Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates

First edition. Small 4to. [36] pp. Publisher's buff French wrappers, printed in black. Copy No 196 of 250 numbered copies on Alfa, out of a total edition of 327 copies, the rest comprising 27 signed copies on Normandy vellum (of which 2 in a lettered and 25 in a numbered state), and 50 copies hors commerce also on Alfa. Published on 23 November 1935, with signed copies priced at 6s and the ordinary edition at 3s 6d. Although the edition run was small, sales were disappointing, with the author gifting single copies to friends and visitors alike well into the 1960s.

Superb condition. Even buff toning to wraps with contents exceptionally fresh and clean.

A slim volume of ten poems, published when the author was in his late twenties, was later self-described as the "work of a very young man who had nothing to say and the itch to make". His biographer, James Knowlson, begged to differ, calling them "the best of his erudite but highly personal poems". The title piece, "Echo's Bones", was originally intended by Beckett to form the "recessional" or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). However, Charles Prentice, his editor at Chatto and Windus, turned it down, as a tad too obscure and nightmarish for inclusion.

[Federman & Fletcher 22]