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Ballard, J G
The Crystal World
Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London;
Date of Publication: 1966
Stock Code: 12037
FIRST EDITION. Octavo, pp. 221, [1]. Publishers’ pale grey cloth with gilt titles to spine in unclipped pictorial dust-jacket featuring Max Ernst’s painting “The Eye of Silence”. Cover cloth lightly rubbed to edge; contents clean with no annotation or inscriptions. Jacket spine lightly sunned with a couple of very slight nicks at tail. A Near Fine copy in like dust-jacket. Dystopian catastrophe novel, the story of an English doctor who travels through the rainforest to a remote leprosy treatment facility in Central Africa amidst a mysterious phenomenon which crystallises everything it touches. Typically “Ballardian” and apopcolyptic, this was Ballard’s influential and highly regarded fourth novel; his earlier 1966 short story “The llluminated Man” has similar themes and locations, published in “The Terminal Beach”. £450.00