A Single Man, Signed by Christopher Isherwood to Craig Graham
[Signed to Craig Graham by Christopher Isherwood] Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. First Edition. 1964. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is inscribed, “For Craig, with best wishes, Christopher Isherwood.”
Christopher Isherwood thought Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway one of the most beautiful novels he had ever read. “It is prose written with absolute pitch, a perfect ear. You could perform it with instruments.” Isherwood set out to recreate that effect in this book. His Mrs. Dalloway is an English expatriate writer/professor living in Los Angeles, a version of Isherwood himself, who recently lost his boyfriend in a fatal car crash (slightly mirroring Isherwood, who was just going through a rough patch in his relationship). The book follows the professor on a seemingly ordinary day that turns out to be anything but. This copy is signed to the proprietor of Vagabond Books, a favorite haunt of Isherwood, Gore Vidal, and Hunter Thompson.
“I’m like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about. I don’t know what it’s about.”
--Christopher Isherwood