Call It Sleep

San Francisco: Arion Press, 1995. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 264 of 326 copies of which three hundred numbered copies signed by the author in pencil. Henry Roth (1905-1995) wrote this momentous novel in 1934. It was a first novel, completed at the age of twenty-seven. Reviews were mixed and the novel slipped quietly into obscurity. After marrying in 1939, Roth moved to Maine where he worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor. Little changed until 1964 when the book was issued in paperback. Overnight it shot to the top of the bestseller lists and was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. It was praised by Alfred Kazin as "the most profound novel of Jewish life by an American."

Bound in gray-green cloth with a dark green goatskin spine with titling in gilt to spine. Letterpress printed in Bulmer type on Zerkall paper. There are 48 black and white photographs that were printed in duotone offset lithography. The photographs were taken in New York City at the approximate period in which the novel is set, 1907-1913. Housed in a slipcase printed in green, with images of brickwork, windows, and the door of a tenement building, emblematic of the windows the protagonist, David Schearl, looks in and out of. Accompanied by the prospectus. In fine condition. Measures 7 x 10.25 inches. 434 numbered pages plus 48 unnumbered pages for the photographs. PRI/100124.