Beloved
By Toni Morrison
 
First UK edition, first impression: Chatto & Windus, 1987. Signed by the author in blue ink to the title page.

Octavo. Original dark green cloth, gilt angel motif to the upper board, spine lettered in gilt. With the original pictorial dust jacket designed by R. D. Scudellari, unclipped and priced £11.95 net in UK only, the rear panel with a photographic portrait of the author.

A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the gilt bright, the contents clean and fresh throughout, with the usual toning to the text-block edges.

The jacket shows a couple of mild instances of wear to the head of the spine and to the top corner of the lower flap, but is otherwise near fine or better.

Signed at The Independent Bookshop, Surrey Street, Sheffield, prior to a launch event at Sheffield's Memorial Hall in the autumn of 1987: the year of publication, and some months before the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year on March 31st.

Morrison's fifth novel, drawn from the case of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in January 1856 and killed her own daughter rather than see her returned; Morrison came upon the account while editing The Black Book in the 1970s. "Beloved" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, having failed the previous year to take the National Book Award - an omission that prompted forty-eight writers and critics, among them Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka, to publish a letter of protest in the New York Times Book Review on 24 January 1988. Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Jonathan Demme's film adaptation followed in 1998. The first American edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1987, the present edition following in London the same year.