Anthony Burgess

First edition, first printing in the first-issue dust jacket, with the original last chapter as Burgess intended.

• Anthony Burgess (English).
• Jacket designed by Barry Trengove (English).
• London: Heinemann, 1962.
• [8], 196 pages.
• Original black cloth boards with original unclipped (16s) fuchsia dust jacket.
• Housed in custom quarter black black clamshell box.

Burgess’s inimitably stylish account of brutal youth, told in a florid invented slang made, if possible, more memorable by Stanley Kubrick’s equally stylish film adaptation. Little Alex’s addiction to ultraviolence cannot be cured and must be endured; the novel’s famous aversion therapy sequence implants no morals and effects no true reform. Most disquietingly, the last chapter — excised from the American edition — suggests that a boyish love of assault and battery is doomed to fade away even as late adolescence wilts into manhood; that Nature will clean up its own mess, succeeding where all the crude instruments of Society failed. A gorgeous copy.