NABOKOV, Vladimir.

Pnin.

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company , 1957.

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Out of Stock Item Number: RRB-144268

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Hand made by the Harcourt Bindery. ~90 days

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First Edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin; Finely Bound by The Harcourt Bindery

First American edition of this ‘campus novel’, a subgenre which was beginning to manifest itself in the early Fifties. Octavo, bound in full morocco by the Harcourt Bindery, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt inner dentelles stamp-signed by the Harcourt Bindery, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. In fine condition. An exceptional presentation.

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically" (John Updike).