NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED

[Jeremy Beacock]

... someone posted only a couple of days ago regarding the first paperback edition of GR; have become a little curious about GR's publishing hisory just recently, and hoped that the old hands could help a new poster out. I recently bought a venerable n-hand copy; soft yellowed pages, old fashioned binding and strange foreshortened green gold cover. It's a Bantam edition, still has typos (mainly homophones-  their/there kind of stuff), and a frontispiece proclaiming that NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED; the fine print states that it is a March 1974 edition, the impression given that it is a first impression (i.e. no first details). Cover blurb quotes extensively from what I assume are contemporary reviews  ¡]'It isn't plausible to call a work of fiction great the week it's published, because the future will decide that' - touchingly old fashioned in its modest ambivalence) - and the back cover namechecks Catch 22, Sotweed Factor and Slaughterhouse 5 (& who reads those, these days?).
 $2.50, btw.
   
  Am not normally interested in such things, but the curious thing about it is that I found it in Taipei, Taiwan; a cosmopolitan place, to be sure, but still, not a place where one runs into fabulously early editions of anything. All I have to suggest anything of its history is that at some point it fell into the hands of at least one (not terribly dedicated) language student - a few tentative underlinings on the first page, a couple on the second, a frenzy on the third, culminating in the tartan of Prentice's blanket, and after that, nothing - and that it has been sold in taiwan at least once before. Still. 
   
  As I say I'd be grateful for any clarification altho' mildly disappointed were i to find it's a late 80s edition; regardless, it's good to begin it again, especially on the Taipei MRT around the 10th anniversary of the tawian strait missile crisis. A screaming came across the sky, and all that.
   
  thanks for any help...
   
  JeremyB

		
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