Céline Death on the Installment Plan 1947 New Directions Lustig Dust Jacket

Description

Céline’s second novel, originally published in France as Mort à crédit in 1936, followed Journey to the End of the Night with another savage, semi-autobiographical plunge into childhood, poverty, humiliation and the grotesque comedy of existence. This New Directions Modern Readers Series edition preserves John H. P. Marks’s original English translation and adds an introduction by Milton Hindus. Céline’s fractured, slang-driven prose became enormously influential; New Directions itself points to the line running from Céline through Henry Miller, Kerouac, Bukowski and the Beat poets.

But the attraction here is the original dust jacket. The fragmented photographic portrait is classic mid-century New Directions design: Céline’s face broken into displaced pieces against fields of black and cream, turning the author himself into something psychologically unstable. The jacket has plainly lived—chips, tears, toning and old repairs—but it survives, and that’s the point. A comparable jacketed Modern Readers Series copy is currently offered at $100, while jacketless copies are readily available for substantially less; this is a book where the surviving period wrapper makes the object.

For the Céline reader, New Directions collector, or anyone who understands that sometimes a beat-up great dust jacket is infinitely more interesting than no jacket at all.