Maggs Bros.

Some rust-staining from one of the two staples, vertical fold, but crisp and unworn. Shortly after completing The Nigger of the “Narcissus” Conrad wrote a preface for it, which the publishers declined to include in the published edition of the book. The author decided to print it privately, and had 100 copies run off (40 of these were said to have been destroyed later and this is supported by the item’s considerable scarcity) by a jobbing printer. The text is described by Conrad’s biographer Jocelyn Baines as “supremely important for the understanding of Conrad’s intention as an artist … together with the preface to A Personal Record, the finest piece of non-fictional prose that he wrote.” Conrad’s enthusiasms often appear a little subdued, but this is not so here: “And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe … an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential … the very truth of their existence. The artist then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal.” The American book artist Leonard Baskin produced a fine edition of the text in 1966, with much critical apparatus, titled Conrad’s Manifesto. Preface to a career.