118
119
118 THOMPSON, Hunter S. Hell’s Angels. New York: Random House, 1967 “Don’t try this at home” First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Frannie, don’t try this at home, HST, Hunter. 8.24.95. W.C.”, referring to the loosely inserted original photograph of William S. Burroughs shooting a rifle in Lawrence, Kansas, May 1995. This title is scarce inscribed. Francine Ness (1949–2019) was born in Valparaiso, Chile, and raised in Montclair. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1971, later moving to Boston before co-founding and opening the Boston Book Annex in 1979. Her next venture was Waiting for Godot Books, which she and her partner Gary Oleson operated for more than forty years, specializing in rare literature. The photograph of Burroughs was taken during a collaboration with Ralph Steadman, where Burroughs fired at original Steadman works. Steadman produced Polaroid portraits throughout the day, with various assistants documenting the process. Though not present for this collaboration, Thompson
had been Burroughs’s shooting partner in the early 1990s, and revered the Beat writer, praising him in Kingdom of Fear (2003): “he was my hero a long time before I ever heard of him”. Burroughs was a gun-lover of Thompson’s calibre, and in 1997, Thompson wrote “The Shootist: A Short Tale of Extreme Precision and No Fear”, a sort of obituary for Burroughs: “William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote – with extreme precision and no fear . . . he would shoot anything, and feared nothing” (quoted in Beatdom ). This was Thompson’s first published book, praised for its close-up portrayal of a gang that was, at the time, widely feared and reviled. Thompson spent almost a year in the company of the Angels, integrating himself to the extent that “I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them”. Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in red and silver, motorcycle design on front cover in silver, top edge black, fore edge untrimmed. With dust jacket. Trivial mark to head of spine. A fine copy in near-fine jacket, spine ends and front fold a touch rubbed, light crease to spine and foot of front panel, short closed tear to head of rear panel and foot of front fold, not price-clipped, very sharp and bright. ¶ David S. Wills, “Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats”, Beatdom , 19 October 2020, available online. £6,750 [157365] 119 TRUMBO, Dalton. Eclipse. London: Lovat Dickson & Thompson Limited, 1935 to a fellow blacklisted screenwriter First edition, first impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title to his friend and colleague at Warner Bros: “To Betty and Morton Grant. Here’s the book! Thanks awfully for the encouragement and criticism which helped so much toward making it a better job than it might have been. Dalton Trumbo 1/16/36.” This was the first published novel by Trumbo, the award- winning American screenwriter who went on to script Roman Holiday , Exodus , Spartacus , and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo . One of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood and an outspoken
118
ONLY CONNECT
92
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker