Books

New York: Random House,, 1972. I need the White Rabbit again! A rare uncorrected proof copy of the first edition of Thompson's most famous book, together with galleys for the book composed from its first appearance in Rolling Stone magazine (November 1971). The magazine text has been excised, photocopied, and expanded to make the galleys. Thompson added four pages of material to the magazine version of Fear and Loathing for its publication in book form, with this expansion appearing here as four photocopied leaves of corrected typescript. His addition reworked the famous bathtub scene, in which Thompson's alter ego Raoul Duke finds his attorney "lying in the tub with a head full of acid and the sharpest knife I'd ever seen, demanding the White Rabbit". In the magazine version, Duke, "a cynical, chain-smoking, whiskey-guzzling, gun-loving connoisseur of illicit drugs" (ANB), puts on "White Rabbit", moves the radio away from the bathtub, and leaves the bathroom. For the book,…

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.