BURGESS, Anthony ~ A Clockwork Orange.

2ND UK PRINTING. Heinemann, London: 1970.

8vo., purple publisher's boards, backstrip lettered in gilt; together in the iconic pink and black pictorial dustwrapper (neatly clipped) designed by Barry Trengrove, featuring a face with speech bubble stating 'yarbles, bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine'; THE BOOK essentially fine, clean and bright with just slight bumping to spine tips, a few tiny spots to the outer edge of the text block; THE WRAPPER also near-fine, perhaps just a touch creased along folds and lightly touched by sun at backstrip. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. Second UK printing, eight years after the first. Burgess' best-known work, 'A Clockwork Orange' was inspired by the writer's traumatic experience of his wife's violent assault by deserters from the US Army during the London blitz. The plot follows protagonist Alex, his gang of violent thugs, and his subsequent capture after a botched robbery. Undergoing aversion therapy (in which he is injected with nausea-inducing drugs while watching violent images), he finds himself revolted by the acts which had previously given him great pleasure. The novel shot him to fame, and is infamous for many reasons: for its use of 'nadsat' (a Russian-inspired language of Burgess' own devising); for its subsequent censorship ban in the U.S.; and perhaps most famously, for the Stanley Kubrick film, which was adapted from the novel in 1971. "The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about", Burgess later claimed, "and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die". A very fresh copy of the second printing, still housed in the iconic dustwrapper for which it is best known.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Near Fine