Fine Books and Manuscripts

8vo (185 x 122 mm). (Scant pale spotting.) Publisher's black gold-stamped cloth (lacking dust jacket, as often, spine dulled). FIRST ENGLISH EDITION, THE FIRST TRANSLATION OF ANY NABOKOV BOOK INTO ENGLISH. Nabokov was unhappy with Winifred Roy's translation, and never allowed it to be reprinted; instead, he translated the work himself and released it as Laughter in the Dark in the United States in 1938. Presumably, unsold copies of this work suffered the same fate as Long's edition of Despair, which was destroyed during the war (see lot 176).VERY RARE: At the time of his 1986 bibliography, Juliar located only 7 copies (including 5 in institutional collections, the dust jacket present in only one copy). According to American Book Prices Current, only 2 copies of this edition have appeared at auction in the last 40 years. Juliar D14.4.