Junkie

First thus [Second U.K. Edition]. 12mo. Pp. 159, [1]. Stiff, olive-green wraps, priced 8/6 to front cover. Preface, Glossary, and with the "medical disclaimers" or Editor's Notes printed to rear rather than within the text itself, as in the first edition. No. 114 in the Traveller's Companion series. 1/5,000 copies printed.

Preceded by the incredibly scarce 1957 first U.K. edition by Digit Books, subsequently withdrawn with remaining copies pulped. Originally published under the pen name William Lee (author's mother's maiden name) by Ace Books, in 1953, in a dos-à-dos with Maurice Helbrant's Narcotic Agent (itself originally published by Vanguard Press, in 1941). The latter, a tough anti-dope message book, helped to blunt Junkie's unapologetic, romantic view of heroin use, at a time when Congress was holding hearings on literature it considered 'morally repugnant'.

The Digit edition however – and first separate edition of Junkie – with its overt message of sex and drugs and without the mitigating influence of Helbrant's abridged 'memoir' proved too much for the British censors. Also, the near-simultaneous publication of Burroughs' 'Letter From a Master Drug Addict To Dangerous Drugs', a subversive piece of comic writing, with faux-scientific terms, deadpan asides and medical jargon reminiscent of the language and narrative of the then forthcoming Naked Lunch, in Vol. 53, No. 2 of The British Journal of Addiction (1956), sealed the Digit edition's doom.

Successive liberalisations of British literary censorship laws in the wake of the unbanning of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960, enabled French publisher-provocateur, Maurice Girodias, to successfully launch Junkie through the auspices of the New English Library.

Minor edge-wear, else Fine.

A spare, unvarnished account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses in the life of an addict, loosely based on the author's own experiences.

[Carol Loranger, "This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions": What Is the Text of Naked Lunch?, Postmodern Culture, Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999; Maynard & Miles A1.d]