The Works of Joseph Conrad: Signed Limited Edition [Including Almayer’s Folly; An Outcast of the Islands; The Nigger of the Narcissus; Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim; Nostromo; The Secret Agent; Under Western Eyes].

CONRAD, Joseph.

Item Number: 107540

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925-26.

First and limited edition, one of only 99 sets signed by Joseph Conrad. Originally conceived as an edition of 377, Conrad died suddenly after signing only 99. The publishers then re-imagined the set as a memorial edition and printed a new limitation leaf, number 30 of 499 numbered sets. The originally limitation leaf (of 377) is unnumbered, but signed; the additional limitation leaf is numbered 30 of 499. Octavo, 23 volumes, bound in original white vellum, top edge gilt, each volume illustrated with an engraved frontispiece. Fine in the original dust jackets with the rare original tissue guards. An exceptional set.

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of 19th-century realism. "His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Salman Rushdie" (John Stape, The Many Lives of Joseph Conrad). A beautiful set in the original dust jackets. Conrad did not publish his first novel until the age of 38, but his work earned him a place with the great modernists of the 20th-century, "among the very great novelists in the language" (Drabble, 225). "Conrad's work at its best achieved a synthesis of theme, treatment, and language of a kind without precedent in English literature Novelty of theme and the piquancy of a non-English origin established him as a romantic, almost as a legendary figure. His stories had excitement of a new kind, and his style, by its very queerness, could allure powerfully achieving a perfect equilibrium of pictorial and narrative style" (DNB).