THE ROVER.
Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923. Original blue cloth decorated in gilt, with dust jacket.
First Trade Edition (preceded one day earlier by a 377-copy special edition), published before the English edition.
The idea of a "rover," with its ambiguity of a man who, Odysseus-like, strives for experience, had been Conrad's plan in all his major fiction after The Shadow-Line... He was exploring what for him was his political, social, and moral world, that society summed up by life on the sea and those who can understand its message. Some of the passages in The Rover display Conrad in his best form, and they are, not improbably, passages of the sea [Karl].
This volume is in fine condition, and the jacket is just-about-fine as well (very slight darkening of its spine as usual, but scarcely any wear or soil). In our opinion the American edition, with its jacket, is considerably less common than its English counterpart. Supino A24.2.0 (this copy); Keating 179. Provenance: discreet bookplate of the Conrad bibliographer David J. Supino; also, loosely inserted is a former description card bearing Supino's extensive collation notes. Item #15417
Price: $295.00