Old Acquaintance

London: Faber and Faber, 1962. Very Good. FIRST EDITION. 8vo. Orange cloth, yellow lettering to spine. Slight lean to spine, gentle pushing and rubbing to spine ends. Edges toned, literary agent's label pasted diagonally to ffep: "Offered by/ Elaine Greene Ltd./ 2 Caxton Street, London, S.W.1.," else, clean and tight. In Phillippe Jullian's fabulously fitting dust jacket: toned, extremities nicked, spine sunned and a little rubbed. Still, Jullian's cover art remains vibrant. A pleasing copy of an attractive edition and an apt queer pairing of author and illustrator. VG/VG The first novel in Stacton's triptych on the theme of 'The Sexes'. A year after its publication, the San Francisco-born author (1923-1968) was named one of Time's 10 best US novelists of the past decade. His British editions tended to precede the American first editions, as here. He also wrote pulp fiction under the pseudonyms Bud Clifton and Carse Boyd. The French illustrator, biographer, aesthete and dandy, Philippe Jullian (1919-1977), illustrated the jackets of two of Stacton's The Sexes Triptych. Elaine Greene (1920-1995) was Stacton's literary agent in the UK. When MCA dissolved its London literary department in 1961, she formed her own literary agency, Elaine Greene Ltd (making the label pasted in here an early example). Greene was also well-connected personally: her second husband, Sir Hugh Greene, was Director-General of the BBC (1960-69) and, thus, Graeme Greene was her brother-in-law; the couple, however, divorced in 1969.