In the Dust Jacket
The Angelic Avengers.
London: Putnam & Co Ltd, [1946].
Price: $175.00
About the item
First edition in English. 303 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Red cloth. Fine, in Near Fine pictorial dust jacket by Michael Wickham (some light toning). Pencil ownership of Claude (cartoonist Calude Smith). Clute, The Book Blinders 72.
Item #216076
The front flap of the jacket introduces the author as “a young Frenchman, born in Rouen in 1915, and educated at Oxford”. The author portrait looks like it dates from before the birth of the “author”. The back flap advertises “Out of Africa” by Karen Blixen.
“Hard to say now who exactly knew and when they did, that Pierre Andrezel — author of Gengaeldelsens Veje (1944), a Danish novel soon translated as The Angelic Avengers (1946) — was yet another pseudonym of Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke (1885-1962), who wrote mainly as Isak Dinesen. She was also known as Karen Blixen. She herself did not explicitly admit to the book until an interview for The Paris Review in 1956. But the secret wouldn't have been exactly difficult to guess for the already numerous readers of her aloof, clawed Strange Stories. […] The front cover, by the polymathic Michael Wickham (1909-1995), wisely provides a double portrait (as there are two protagonists), much more satisfactory than the original from Gyldendal, which the later Random House cover lamely reproduces. In the end this dust-jacket foolery seems a gift: an ensemble, a joke, an imposture, a confession” (Clute).
