Nabokov, Vladimir | A charming presentation copy, inscribed with a drawing of a butterfly

Nabokov, Vladimir

Lolita. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1958]

8vo. Printed "Compliments of the Author" card taped to front-free endpaper. Original cloth-backed gray patterned boards, spine stamped in gilt, top edges stained red; lightly bumped. Publisher's cream dust jacket; some edgewear, a few small closed tears, spine browned and chipped with an old tape repair.

First American edition, second impression. Presentation copy, inscribed with drawing of a butterfly to his sister-in-law Sonia Slonim ("For Sonia from Vladimir Nabokov | August 1958")

This first American edition of Lolita is the first complete appearance of the novel in America (about a third of it had been excerpted in the Anchor Review for June 1957). It was preceded by the first edition published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1955. The American edition has some minor textual revisions made from the Paris first edition and has an author's afterword, "On a Book Entitled Lolita." In this postscript Nabokov recounts the difficulties he had trying to publish the novel in the United States. He first wanted the book to be issued anonymously, but, "realizing how likely a mask was to betray my own cause, I decided to sign Lolita. The four American publishers...who were in turn offered the typescript and had their readers glance at it, were shocked by Lolita." After the great success of the Putnam's edition of the novel, a British edition followed the next year.

Scarce signed in any edition, Vera Nabokov noted this in a letter to Anita Loos, explaining that her husband "has been autographing Lolita only for personal friends and the very few writers whose work he admires. He has refused his autograph to so many of his own students and to so many of his acquaintances that it would be impossible for him to make an exception... " The present inscription to Sonia Slonim — a close member of the Nabokov family — is embellished with a black and red butterfly. Nabokov was an authority on the study of lepidoptera (he was granted a Harvard Fellowship to pursue the subject) and the butterfly motif is one that often occurs in his inscriptions. 

REFERENCE:

Juliar A28.2; Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-77, ed. D. Nabokov and M. J. Bruccoli, p. 265.

PROVENANCE:

Vladimir Nabokov (author's book-label affixed to paste-down) — Sonia Slonim