Timothy Leary What Does Woman Want? Signed 1976 Limited First Edition

Description

A wonderfully strange artifact from the post-prison Timothy Leary: What Does Woman Want?, published in 1976 by his own 88 Books in a numbered first edition of 5,000 copies. Leary called it “science faction,” combining autobiography, psychology, sex, evolutionary theory, extraterrestrial intelligence, counterculture mythology and science fiction into what became his first and only novel. Written out of the extraordinary period surrounding his imprisonment, escape, flight overseas and eventual return to the United States, the book recasts Leary and the people around him as characters in an interplanetary evolutionary drama. Even the production is pure Leary—the wildly shifting typography, John Eastman’s orange cover drawing, graphics by Yuki Sakata and Joanna Leri, and a Robert Anton Wilson blurb on the rear wrapper. The text even acknowledges permission to reprint material from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

This copy is number 3918 of 5,000 and inscribed and signed by Leary in blue ink, substantially elevating it above the relatively inexpensive unsigned copies that occasionally surface. The New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary archive itself contains inscribed copies of this 1976 edition, while signed first editions are decidedly scarcer in the trade.

Timothy Leary, numbered, inscribed, signed and operating at maximum 1970s weirdness. Exactly the sort of book that belongs in a serious counterculture collection.