The Owl Service.

GARNER, Alan.

$5,500.00

Item Number: 117475

London: 1967, Collins.

First edition of this classic work, winner of the Guardian Award and Carnegie Medal. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author to his niece and goddaughter on the half-title page, “For Brenda from Alan.” Also signed in full on the title page by Alan Garner. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Kenneth Farnhill.

“Alan Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful. His work is where human emotion and mythic resonance, sexuality and geology, modernity and memory and craftsmanship meet and cross-fertilise. Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names. But that’s the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires. I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration" (Philip Pullman).