Giovanni's Room [Review Copy]

New York: The Dial Press, 1956. Very Good/Very Good. New York: The Dial Press, 1956. First Edition. Octavo. 248 pp. Illustrated dust jacket with $3.00 price present. Marble paper-covered boards with black spine and silver lettering. Review copy with publisher's promotional slip and author photograph laid in. Dust jacket worn along edges with light chipping, a few short tears, and larger chip to top of spine; toning to spine and spotting to verso. Boards lightly edgeworn with minor soiling. Binding sound. Faint perfume odor; touch of spotting to top edge and off-setting to endpaper; interior else clean and unmarked. A Very Good copy.

Initially rejected by his publisher, Knopf, Giovanni's Room remains one of Baldwin's most revered works. As Hilton Als' writes in his 2019 essay, "Giovanni's Room Revisited," "Baldwin wanted to prove in this book what he had left American to prove, that he was not 'merely' a Negro writer, that he would not let his talent be defined by racial subjects, that he was important enough and as bad as any white boy artist out there. Badder, even, since Giovanni's Room was about sex in a way none of those guys--Jones, Mailer, etc.--could, up to that point, ever relax long enough to explore fully in their fiction."

[Bixby-Baldwin Collection A3.a]. (Inventory #: 31214)