Lawrence Krauser Lemon 2000 First Edition – Unique Hand-Drawn McSweeney’s Jacket

Description

Lemon occupies a wonderfully peculiar place in McSweeney’s history: it was the young publisher’s first novel, appearing in 2000 shortly after McSweeney’s began publishing books. The novel itself is an absurdist love story about a man’s passionate attachment to a lemon, mixing prose, drama and even rhymed couplets. But Dave Eggers and Lawrence Krauser decided the physical book should be as eccentric as the story. The first printing was issued with essentially blank jackets bearing the title and author, which Krauser then individually drew upon by hand. The Harry Ransom Center records that Krauser ultimately completed 9,812 unique jackets from the 10,000-copy U.S. printing—turning nearly every copy into a different piece of original artwork.

This copy carries a particularly strong example: a large, boldly brushed abstract human face filling most of the front panel, with LEMON incorporated into the composition. It isn’t a printed reproduction of Krauser artwork—the drawing is the artwork, executed directly onto this particular jacket. Examples vary enormously because Krauser drew thousands of them; surviving jackets range from elaborate representational drawings to much simpler late-production marks and doodles. A remarkable publishing experiment from early McSweeney’s and a book in which the distinction between first edition and original artwork becomes delightfully blurry.

An early McSweeney’s landmark—and one of those rare first editions for which no other copy has exactly the same jacket.