Junkie / Narcotic Agent by Burroughs, William S. writing as William Lee; Helbrant, Maurice - 1953

Ace, New York, 1953. First edition. Condition: Very good plus; book has slight edge wear and creasing along spine, slight darkening on interior pages. Ace Double Books D-15.Burroughs' classic "confessions of an unredeemed drug addict". His first published book. A very nice copy of this famous example of "write what you know".

NY: Ace Double, 1953. [1st printing](1953) #D-15. Cover art is uncredited [Al Rossi]. Paperback original for "Junkie". Creasing; edge and corner wear with minor nicks and dings; tanning; first page erasures. In nicer condition than is usually the case.. First Edition. Mass Market Paperback. Very Good.

New York: Ace Books, 1953. First Edition. Softcover. Near fine. 16mo, 149p.; 169pp. A crisp, clean, near fine copy of this notoriously fragile mass market paperback. Notable corner crease and a small inked letter "B" to the front wrap (of "Junkie"), and very mild rubbing to extremities, but no spine cracks, and no loose or torn pages. A very nice example of Burrough's first book, SIGNED and INSCRIBED by him on the title page to Matthew Monaghan, the one-tiime director of the Gotham Book Mart gallery: "For Matthew Monaghan, all the best, William Burroughs." Laid-in is a typed letter (dated October 3, 1974) from James Grauerholz, a close friend of Burroughs who became his business manager and eventual literary executor. In the letter, Grauerholz presents the inscribed copy to Monaghan, and also asks him, "By the way, do you know where [Gregory] Corso is these days? Nobody we know seems to be able to reach him--he may be travelling." Grauerholz had been introduced to Burroughs by Allen Ginsberg, and… Read More

New York: Ace Books, Inc, 1953. First Edition. Burroughs's first book, a semi-autobiographical field report from the seedy underbelly of post-war America, chronicling his experiences using and selling drugs and vacillating between addiction and recovery. While undated, this copy was inscribed in 1964, the year Burroughs made contact with Ted Berrigan, "the bearded, overweight father figure of the Lower East Side poetry scene. He was the editor of C: A Journal of Poetry, and had published one of Bill's experimental texts, "Giver of Winds Is My Name," in the summer of 1964, the first of his texts to use Egyptian glyphs. Berrigan was enthusiastic about his work so Bill gave him another text, "Fits of Nerves with a Fix," which he published that February. Berrigan arranged to publish Bill's own thirty-two-page version of Time magazine, a three-column collaged text using the cover and title page of the November 30, 1962 issue of Time, which had contained the libelous review of Naked Lunch called "King of… Read More