Read, Herbert

The Green Child

New York: New Directions, c1963. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. Hardcover with dust jacket, no signatures, plates or slipcase. The jacket is non-matching compared with known 1948 variants (same as a 1960s softcover example). with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth.

Binding: Tight and square. Text block clean, no markings. Pages show light, even age-toning. Moderate shelf wear overall. Dust jacket: toned, with a spot on the front top and push to the spine; jacket is not the standard 1948 issue for this first U.S. edition. Corners and edges show some wear; spine shows typical browning. Overall, a solid collectible copy given the jacket condition and variant.

‘First American edition text (New Directions, 1948; LoC 48-9595) in a later New Directions dust jacket bearing a ZIP-coded address (NY 10014) and front-flap photo credit to Jean Krulis; not the 1948 Alvin Lustig jacket. 

Provenance: From the estate of Horizon Books publisher Ben Raeburn that passed to his partner Patricia. Raeburn’s long publishing career overlapped with that of New Directions founder James Laughlin; both men operated within the same post-war circle of independent presses that championed modernist and experimental literature. It is possible this copy—with its later New Directions dust jacket—was retained or circulated within professional publishing channels.

While no documentation confirms an in-house trial or file-copy status, its provenance provides an authentic association with the small-press literary world that fostered Herbert Read, Kenneth Rexroth, and other New Directions authors.

The Green Child is Herbert Read’s only novel, significant because Read is better known as an English poet, art critic and anarchist intellectual. According to bibliographic history: first published in London by Heinemann in 1935. A New Directions edition in the U.S. followed in 1948 with Rexroth’s introduction.

Item #21211

Price: $45.00