In Patagonia

London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. An exceptional first impression ("First published 1977), first issue (map endpapers.), without even a degree of fading to the dust jacket spine panel's fugitive colors, of Chatwin's first book. 8vo: [4],204pp, with map frontispiece, and 14 full- and half-page photographs; pictorial dust jacket, priced £4.95. Publisher's navy blue cloth-effect paper-covered boards; jacket with wrap-around photogaph of the Moreno glacier. Fine, tight, and virtually pristine (white speck to rear cover, hint of lightening to spine). The author's "autobiografictional" travelogue, which "both records and imagines the fulfilment of one of Bruce Chatwin's childhood fascinations, namely to retrace the travel adventures of his grandmother's uncle, Charley Milward, seadog, entrepreneur, and globetrotting family legend, who had died in Punta Arenas, Chile. . . . While the narrative, in a staccato series of short sections (numbered from 1 to 97), meanders about in time and space, mixing fiction and fact, the reader encounters the Patagonian present of Chatwin's own visit: Welsh villages complete with gardens and tea-rooms, gauchos, a French soprano, a young pianist who asks complicated questions about Liszt, an elderly German yearning back to the times of Mad King Ludwig, a would-be miner from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco . . . . The fabulously self-absorbed travelogue launched Chatwin's successful writing career and won him the Hawthornden prize as well as the E. M. Forster award." (The Literary Encyclopedia) N. B. With few exceptions (always identified), we only stock books in exceptional condition, with dust jackets carefully preserved in archival, removable polypropylene sleeves. All orders are packaged with care and posted promptly. Satisfaction guaranteed.