Nov 18, 2014 - Sale 2366

Sale 2366 - Lot 162

Price Realized: $ 1,430
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
RARE PROOF WITH TEXTUAL VARIANTS NABOKOV, VLADIMIR. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in Five Parts. 8vo, printed wrappers, trace of shelfwear to bottom edges; front endpaper and title page detached and loosely inserted; hand paginated prior to production. New York: McGraw Hill, [1969]
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Additional Details

rare uncorrected proof of the first american edition. Typographically the proof is identical in font and line width to the published first edition but differs in pagination: the first edition is 589 pages, the proof 595. The proof lacks the second title page; the one-page listing of other works by Nabokov; dedication; editor's note; and two-page family tree listing the novel's major characters.
Textually, the proof differs from the first edition in minor instances throughout; both by the presence of occasional typos in the proof not present in the published version (a pair of missing quotation marks later added, a misprinted "dit" corrected to "it," etc.), as well as in evidence of several small but compelling textual changes. A memorable phrase describing Ada as "my lovely octopussycat," for instance, is present in the proof but omitted from the first edition; likewise a description in the proof of the protagonist Van kissing "his half-sister's hot hard pommette cum gutta salis" was published simply as "his half-sister's hot hard pommette." Other examples include: "Van's cottage orné" in the first edition is here the English "Van's pretty cottage"; a passing character's name is here Hans instead of Bernard; "Seneca" is here "a Younger Seneca"; an "editor's note" in a quotation from Ada's letter changes from the standard "sic." to the more emphatic "sic!" in the published version.