The Rover.

CONRAD, Joseph.

Item Number: 123934

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923.

Signed limited and true first edition of Conrad’s last complete novel. Octavo, original publisher’s gilt-decorated boards, tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Conrad from an etching by Muirhead Bone, top edge gilt with others untrimmed. One of three hundred and seventy-seven numbered copies signed by the author on the limitation leaf, this is number 363. In very good condition. Bookplate.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, The Rover conveys the story of a French pirate, master-gunner, and "rover of the outer seas", who attempts, in vain, to find refuge from his action and blood-filled life in an isolated farmhouse on the Giens Peninsula. Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please." The epigraph would later serve as Conrad's epitaph.