Books

Jacket design by Kate Cary. First British edition. The first British edition of Morrison's landmark first novel, published nine years after its initial American publication, featuring a stunning unclipped dust jacket. One of the scarcest books of the 1970s regardless of genre, the book's frank discussions of sensitive topics such as racism, incest, religion, and child molestation has provoked continuous attempts to remove it from schools and public libraries across the United States, landing it as the American Library Association's 10th most banned book from 2010 2019. Ignoring the controversy, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company developed it as a stage play in the early 2000s, premiering it in February 2005, and it had a limited Off-Broadway run in New York the following year. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, becoming the first African-American woman to do so. Blue cloth, stamped in gilt on spine; two-color illustrated dust jacket, unclipped; fine.

The Bluest Eye is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It was published in 1970 and is set in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison's hometown. The story is about Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl who prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be considered beautiful and gain the affection and acceptance of her community.