The Northern Lights (narrator’s copy)

New York: Summit Books, 1987. First printing. 236 pp., 5.75 x 8.75 inches. Quarter-cloth and paper over boards, in printed dust-jacket. Light edgewear and bumps to corners, otherwise very good in a very good dust-jacket (for peculiarities of this copy, see rest of description).

Howard Norman’s first publications were celebrated translations from traditional narrative poems of the Swampy Cree and other indigenous peoples (The Wishing Bone Cycle and Where the Chill Comes From, for example); he has also translated a volume of Haitian folktales by Paule Barton (The Woe Shirt). Alongside these renderings he has published more than a dozen novels and books of stories, most of which are set in the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

The Northern Lights was his first novel, and first nontranslated book for adults. This is a copy with a mysterious provenance, seemingly used for an unidentified recording. A label in masking tape on the front of the jacket, only part of which remains, once read “NARRATOR,” and the first and last pages are marked up in two colors of ink to indicate what parts of the frontmatter are to be read aloud before launching into the text proper.

The author has no recollection of a recording of the novel having been made (by Summit Books, or anyone else), yet clearly the book was prepared for that purpose. The National Library Service for the Blind of the Library of Congress does show a record in their catalog for a recording from 1989, with Talking Book Publishers listed as the recording agency and Eva-Tone as the distributor; in the absence of information to the contrary, that would seem to be a likely possibility, though it seems conceivable that there could have been another ephemeral occasion.

Curious, and unique.