Lolita
$25,000 · Offered by Biblio
Signed
London: Corgi Books, 1969. Fourteenth Corgi paperback edition, first reissue. Color photographic wrappers; light wear to extreme head of spine. Evidence of prior label on inside front cover and half title, with light residue over inscription area. Fourteenth Corgi paperback edition, first reissue. This late British paperback reissue of Nabokov's controversial masterpiece - featuring Bert Stern's famous 1960 publicity photograph of Sue Lyon as Lolita on the cover - was released just twenty days prior to the author inscribing it in Russian to his wife Véra on May 21, 1969, along with an original colored drawing of an invented butterfly he named "babochka skoraya," which translates as "lissom butterfly." Nabokov, a noted lepidopterist as well as author, inscribed copies of nearly all of his first editions to Véra over the course of their long marriage, in most cases including a drawing of a butterfly, real or imagined (in this case, the latter). Here he refers to his wife by a favorite diminutive, "Veruschka," spelled out in cyrillic letters (also seen in several other of his inscriptions to her), and utilizes a date format ("21.V.69") present in numerous additional editions. Both the inscription and the butterfly (in shades of gray and red) are drawn in pencil, and rendered with so much pressure that Nabokov left reliefs of them on the following two pages; he had done a very similar thing in the 1957 first Swedish edition of Lolita to Véra. In the Appendix at rear are selection
- Publisher: Corgi Books
- Year: 1969
- Edition: Fourteenth Corgi paperback edition, first reissue
- Binding: unknown
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