Jonah (First Australian Edition)

A lovely copy of Louis Stone’s Sydney larrikin classic in the rare Norman Lindsay dust jacket.

Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) is one of the foundations of Australian urban fiction. Its hero is a hunchbacked larrikin who leads a street gang, the “Push”, through the Sydney slums, and who tries to leave that life behind when he becomes a father. A reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1911 praised its humour, observation and kindness and noted that it refused to idealise its squalid subject. The first English editions went out of print and had become hard to find by 1933, when the Endeavour Press issued this Sydney reprint. A contemporary account of the new edition called it a worthy successor to Robbery Under Arms and recorded that second-hand copies of the original had fetched as much as £2 10s. The novel was later adapted as a television miniseries by the ABC in 1982 and as a musical, Jonah Jones, in 1985.

First Australian Edition. Octavo. 296pp. Burgundy cloth in the original illustrated dust jacket, unclipped, illustrated by Norman Lindsay. Very good in a like dust jacket. There is a touch of wear to the jacket along the edges and spine ends and some mild discolouration along creases, with remnant adhesive marks from tape to the turn-ins. The binding is tight and square, with some scattered foxing along the edges, and the contents are generally clean and bright.

Not currently on display in store. For viewing or more information, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000936