The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

STERNE, Laurence (intro. Christopher Morley; illus. T. M. Cleland). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1980.

Large Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Light brown silk moiré endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 444 pp. Frontispiece and interior illustrations by T. M. Cleland throughout. Errata strip laid in. Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written series. Originally published in nine volumes, York and London: Ann Ward and Dodsley, 1759–67.

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) was an Irish-born Anglican clergyman who had spent most of his adult life as a country parson in Yorkshire before publishing the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1759 at his own expense and at the age of forty-six. They were an immediate sensation. He published a further seven volumes between 1761 and 1767, each instalment equally awaited and equally confounding, and died the year after the last volume appeared, his health destroyed by the tuberculosis he had lived with for most of his writing life.

Tristram Shandy is, among other things, a novel about the impossibility of writing a novel. Its narrator, Tristram, sets out to write his life and opinions, and the digressions required to establish proper context — what was happening in the room when he was conceived, what was in his father's mind, the character and opinions of his Uncle Toby, the history of the Shandy family nose — multiply so relentlessly that he is still in the womb on page 444, having established to his own satisfaction that the more he writes the further behind he falls. The formal game is sustained with absolute consistency: every chapter delayed, every narrative interrupted, every conventional expectation of fiction subverted with such comprehensive thoroughness that the subversion itself becomes a kind of structure.

Coleridge called it one of the three great original minds in English literature (alongside Shakespeare and Bacon). Nietzsche admired it. Virginia Woolf placed Sterne alongside Austen and Hardy. The novel has been described as post-modern before postmodernism, experimental before experiment was a literary category, and metafictional before the term was coined. It is also, beneath all the formal play, very funny — and the affecting character of Uncle Toby, the retired soldier whose hobby-horse is constructing model fortifications in the garden and whose absolute innocence of malice makes him the moral centre of a book apparently organised entirely around eccentricity and digression, gives the comedy a warmth that pure formal experiment rarely achieves.

The introduction is by Christopher Morley (1890–1957), the American essayist and novelist whose genial literary enthusiasms made him one of the most trusted book guides of his generation. The illustrations are by T. M. Cleland (1880–1964), the American typographer and book designer whose visual interpretations of classic texts for the Heritage Press and Limited Editions Club tradition are among the distinguished productions of twentieth-century American book art.

Fine. Presenting as new. Errata strip laid in.

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Catalogue Number: HH000601