*SOLD*
 
Herman Melville
New York, 1852
 
First Edition, first printing. Original blind stamped purple binding faded, some cloth replaced at top of spine, brown-coated endpapers, collector's bookplate, general light to moderate foxing. A Very Good, sound copy housed in a cloth slipcase.
 
One of Melville's scarcest titles with less than 300 surviving copies. A book that was critically panned and sold so poorly that it hurried Melville's march towards obscurity. Aside from its noted rarity, scholarship has found it to be a highly complex work with underlying LGBTQ themes.
 
‘Exploration of the homoerotic themes in the novel dates back to the 1950s with such critics as Richard Chase and Walter Sutton. These two critics briefly pointed to the existence of homosexual allusions in the novel. Chase claimed that “Melville’s estrangement from society and his consciousness of his estrangement have something to do with what today we would call sexuality”; he indirectly suggests that “many of Melville’s pathologies and fears resulted from his sexual tensions”...
 
With the rise of many late-twentieth-century progressive and radical movements such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist movement, and the Gay Rights movement, Gay criticism, with the newly-won sexual freedom and the new changes in social attitudes about sexuality, gained momentum in opening new insights that revolutionized Melvillean studies.’
 
Ref: Melville’s Codes and Ambiguities in Pierre: Critical Dimensions Re-Examined, Banisalamah