Book Details
Title: The Sot-Weed Factor
Author: John Barth
Illustrator: N/A
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Year: 1976
Impression/Edition: N/A
Cover: Hardcover with Dust Jacket
Pages: 795
Dimensions:
Weight:
ISBN: 436 03371 2
Battle Scars:
Outside:
The dust jacket is whole and intact. There is some minor shelf wear to edges/ends and corners. There is a small spot on the right bottom corner where the top laminate layer of the cover art has peeled away. A couple of marks here and there, minor foxing on the inner flaps and superficial scuffing. On the rear side of the dust cover there is what looks to be like some water/liquid staining as pictured.
The hardcover is very well preserved. Minimal if any shelf wear. Minor crushing to ends of spine and small amount of bumping to corners. The embossing on the spine is intact and legible.
The page margins (seen when book is closed) are slightly discoloured (tanned). The top end margin and a little into the long side profile shows a darker stain, which looks to be a liquid/water stain.
Inside:
The binding remains firm and intact.
Inside the front and back covers there is some discolouration/tanning and discolouration where it seems the dust jacket has settled.
The pages are intact. There is tanning of the margins. Some (mild) warping to the tops of pages, more moderate in some areas than others.
Don't forget to check the photos below for a visual and make sure you are happy prior to purchase. Happy to answer questions if there is information missing.
Book Content:
Blurb -
"For better or worse a man must lose his innocence in order to gain man's estate. Such is the underlying theme of 'The Sot-Weed Factor', a mountain of a novel with a bow to Cervantes here, a nod to Boccaccio there, a wink at Rabelais when the moment is appropriate, but which always remains its inimitable self as it pursues its bawdy, exciting, outrageous, tragicomic course through the late 17th and early 18th centuries from London and Cambridge to Maryland in the new world, to the ultimate acquisition of a sot-weed (tobacco) estate of which the novel's hero becomes the factor (manager).
Eben and Anna Cooke were twins and grew up unusually close. In 1676, when they were ten, their father engaged for them a new tutor, Henry Burlinghame III (if that is indeed the true name of so chameleon-esque a person), a swarthy youth in his early twenties whose knowledge of the seamy side of life was as extensive as the idealistic Eben's was narrow. These three, and Eben's valet, the pliable and dishonest Bertrand, are the main characters in a book packed with extraordinary portaits.
It is his virginity that Eben, who has learned the knack of falsifying, prizes above all else, and so it is that when he finds himself, as the result of a momentous wager with a rival poet in his bedroom with the whore, Joan Toast, he will not yield to her seductions though he falls in love with her beyond all doubt. "May ye suffer French pox, ye great ass!" Joan replied, as she "left the room in a heat". From this millennial moment Eben's adventures begin, for his father ships him off to the fields and forests of the New World to claim the family estate. Thither, with a commission from Lord Baltimore as "poet and laureate" of the new colony, he goes to write his 'Marylandiad'.
Alas, his troubles begin even before embarkation at Plymouth. His own valet betrays him and takes his place. Burlinghame's behaviour is cruel. The unfortunate poet boards the Poseidon, but the voyage is ill-fated. They are captured by pirates, and finally Eben walks the plank to swim luckily ashore in Maryland itself. But here his troubles are are but beginning.
Conspiracy and intrigue, confusion of identities, rape, murder, legal process, the negro slaves' discontent, the Indian's hatred, a thousand startling and absorbing events crowd upon the reader. In particular, there is the search of Burlinghame for his ancestry and the mystery of the egg-plant or aubergine as related in the last pages of Captain John Smith's Journal. As on the final page, Eben and Joan Toast are united, "Ah, well now!" the father's voice cried from the parlour, "We've a deal to drink to, lords and ladies!" The reader too will need a drink to console him in his sorrow at finishing one of the most remarkable and enjoyable books of the decade.
For here is a picture, as in some lost eighteenth-century novel, of the world that gave birth to our world, a likeness of England and the Americal colonies before modern technology and science took so firm a hold. In "The Sot-Weed Factor", there is no angst; a spade is called a spade, a whore a whore. It is a man's world of strong action and bawdy talk, as far from the petty pornography of this milksop, skirt-ridden age as, even today, Mars and Venus are from Planet Earth."
Book Details
Title: The Sot-Weed Factor
Author: John Barth
Illustrator: N/A
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Year: 1976
Impression/Edition: N/A
Cover: Hardcover with Dust Jacket
Pages: 795
Dimensions:
Weight:
ISBN: 436 03371 2
Battle Scars:
Outside:
The dust jacket is whole and intact. There is some minor shelf wear to edges/ends and corners. There is a small spot on the right bottom corner where the top laminate layer of the cover art has peeled away. A couple of marks here and there, minor foxing on the inner flaps and superficial scuffing. On the rear side of the dust cover there is what looks to be like some water/liquid staining as pictured.
The hardcover is very well preserved. Minimal if any shelf wear. Minor crushing to ends of spine and small amount of bumping to corners. The embossing on the spine is intact and legible.
The page margins (seen when book is closed) are slightly discoloured (tanned). The top end margin and a little into the long side profile shows a darker stain, which looks to be a liquid/water stain.
Inside:
The binding remains firm and intact.
Inside the front and back covers there is some discolouration/tanning and discolouration where it seems the dust jacket has settled.
The pages are intact. There is tanning of the margins. Some (mild) warping to the tops of pages, more moderate in some areas than others.
Don't forget to check the photos below for a visual and make sure you are happy prior to purchase. Happy to answer questions if there is information missing.
Book Content:
Blurb -
"For better or worse a man must lose his innocence in order to gain man's estate. Such is the underlying theme of 'The Sot-Weed Factor', a mountain of a novel with a bow to Cervantes here, a nod to Boccaccio there, a wink at Rabelais when the moment is appropriate, but which always remains its inimitable self as it pursues its bawdy, exciting, outrageous, tragicomic course through the late 17th and early 18th centuries from London and Cambridge to Maryland in the new world, to the ultimate acquisition of a sot-weed (tobacco) estate of which the novel's hero becomes the factor (manager).
Eben and Anna Cooke were twins and grew up unusually close. In 1676, when they were ten, their father engaged for them a new tutor, Henry Burlinghame III (if that is indeed the true name of so chameleon-esque a person), a swarthy youth in his early twenties whose knowledge of the seamy side of life was as extensive as the idealistic Eben's was narrow. These three, and Eben's valet, the pliable and dishonest Bertrand, are the main characters in a book packed with extraordinary portaits.
It is his virginity that Eben, who has learned the knack of falsifying, prizes above all else, and so it is that when he finds himself, as the result of a momentous wager with a rival poet in his bedroom with the whore, Joan Toast, he will not yield to her seductions though he falls in love with her beyond all doubt. "May ye suffer French pox, ye great ass!" Joan replied, as she "left the room in a heat". From this millennial moment Eben's adventures begin, for his father ships him off to the fields and forests of the New World to claim the family estate. Thither, with a commission from Lord Baltimore as "poet and laureate" of the new colony, he goes to write his 'Marylandiad'.
Alas, his troubles begin even before embarkation at Plymouth. His own valet betrays him and takes his place. Burlinghame's behaviour is cruel. The unfortunate poet boards the Poseidon, but the voyage is ill-fated. They are captured by pirates, and finally Eben walks the plank to swim luckily ashore in Maryland itself. But here his troubles are are but beginning.
Conspiracy and intrigue, confusion of identities, rape, murder, legal process, the negro slaves' discontent, the Indian's hatred, a thousand startling and absorbing events crowd upon the reader. In particular, there is the search of Burlinghame for his ancestry and the mystery of the egg-plant or aubergine as related in the last pages of Captain John Smith's Journal. As on the final page, Eben and Joan Toast are united, "Ah, well now!" the father's voice cried from the parlour, "We've a deal to drink to, lords and ladies!" The reader too will need a drink to console him in his sorrow at finishing one of the most remarkable and enjoyable books of the decade.
For here is a picture, as in some lost eighteenth-century novel, of the world that gave birth to our world, a likeness of England and the Americal colonies before modern technology and science took so firm a hold. In "The Sot-Weed Factor", there is no angst; a spade is called a spade, a whore a whore. It is a man's world of strong action and bawdy talk, as far from the petty pornography of this milksop, skirt-ridden age as, even today, Mars and Venus are from Planet Earth."
