Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up To Me
New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1967. 1st Paperback Edition. 12mo, publisher's illustrated stiff paper wraps, all edges stained turquoise.
"I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to cloud men’s minds." First mass market paperback edition of the only book writer and folk musician Richard Fariña published in his lifetime. The comic picaresque story, which follows Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a modern-day Odysseus, on his peregrination throughout the American west has, since its initial publication in 1966, become a counterculture classic. In a blurbed excerpt from Thomas Pynchon's original introduction — the two became acquainted at Cornell University — the postmodernist godhead describes Fariña's novel as "coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch...hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time." (Pynchon later dedicated Gravity’s Rainbow to Fariña, who tragically died in 1966 at only 29 years of age in a motorcycle accident while returning from a party celebrating the hardcover publication of the novel.) Stated first Dell printing, "June 1967." Spine creased and rolled, some soiling to wraps. Very good. Item #6701
$85.00