Books

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. First Edition. Hardcover. Good/Very Good. Translated by William Weaver. With a laid-in holograph postcard signed by Calvino to scholar Albert Howard Carter. Good in a Very Good Fine jacket, unclipped ($6.50), rubbed at the surface and edges, a few small chips at the head of the spine. Quarter grey buckram with black paper on the boards, bumped and rubbed at the edges and corners. Bound with a forward lean and some reading wear, annotations from Calvino scholar Albert Howard Carter throughout, demonstrating the effort required to puzzle together the order of the book. Calvino's novel in the form of a time traveling conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Neblua Award nominee in 1975.

Invisible Cities, written by Italo Calvino, is a novel that explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by the explorer Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.

Determining if a copy of 'Invisible Cities' is a first edition can involve checking the publisher's details and the presence of a dust jacket with specific art. For this novel, verifying the Giulio Einaudi Editore imprint for the Italian edition and checking for the presence of dates and print numbers inside the book could help ascertain its status as a first edition. Collectors would often look for specific cover art or identifying marks specific to the first edition release.