Liebling. (Inscribed and signed)

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Inscribed: “For my German readers—my first effort, Iris Owens aka Harriet Daimler.” First German printing of Darling, originally published by Olympia Press in 1956. Owens’s first book using a pseudonym.

Iris Owens (1929–2008), Olympia Press writer, pornographer, satirist, Paris and Greenwich Village resident. Samuel Beckett praised her and Terry Southern wrote that “aside from her Junoesque beauty, [Owens] had rapier wit and devastating logic. She was a pre-Sontag Sontag.” In the 1950s and ‘60s, Owens resided in Paris and was connected with the expatriate writers’ circle known who created the literary journal Merlin. This group included prominent figures like Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue, John Stevenson, George Plimpton, and Richard Seaver.

“Owens was very private about her 1960s. She left no memoir, and her friends offer no account.” (Scott) Beginning in the early 1980s, she began to suffer from agoraphobia and “by the 1990s she barely left her flat at all. Owens died in 2008 in relative obscurity, without a New York Times obituary.” (ibid) Owens’s withdrawal from society may explain the rarity of finding her books signed, let alone inscribed. We locate no inscribed copies in the trade and just one auction record for a signed (only) copy of After Claude that brought £450 ($550) in 2022.

Price: $150.00