first edition of Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor

Barth, John.  The Sot-Weed Factor.  Garden City: Doubleday, 1960.  Octavo, original cloth, original dust-jacket.  $600.

"In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fobs and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling fitch called Ebenezer Crooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point..."

First edition of Barth's breakthrough novel, a masterpiece of early postmodernist fiction.  This copy is a publisher's complimentary copy with Doubleday bookplate on front pastedown.  A very good copy in a very good example of a notoriously difficult dustjacket (due to its being slightly too big for the book).