The Horse's Tale

London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1949. First edition. 112 pp. Gray cloth, rounded corners, spine lettered in white. No dust jacket, possibly as issued. Spine text dulled, leaves toned, as always given the paper the book was printed on.

The first and only edition of one of Anna Kavan's rarest books, written with her psychiatrist and close friend Dr. Karl Bluth, printed on cheap paper in Lübeck in a fugitive edition shortly after the end of the war. Bluth was both Kavan's psychiatrist and a lifelong friend- a sounding-board, collaborator and encourager- and he also supplied Kavan with legal prescriptions of heroin, which he administered daily. After (truncated) his death in 1964 Kavan said she felt abandoned. The book is not listed as a Gaberbocchus publication in The Themersons and the Gaberbocchus Press- An Experiment in Publishing, 1948-1979, Jan Kubasiewicz and Monica Strauss, eds.

A reddit review describes the book thus and probably can't be bettered: "Barely exists online. Published once in a small batch in 1949. Very basic summary: A talking philosopher/poet horse founds an art movement called 'Hoofism' and achieves success in the art world. Accidentally gets drunk at a party and gets institutionalized but the friends he made earlier in the book help him get out. Eventually he moves back into his childhood horse herd. Very Freudian and overall very very weird. (Inventory #: 2451)