THE NEW YORK TRILOGY: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986. First edition. Fine in fine jackets.. Signed first printings (all) of Auster's beloved and best-known work, a postmodern deconstruction of the detective novel. Initially inspired by a wrong number placed to his house asking for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Auster's interlocking series of novels take as their starting point classic mysteries, but use them to investigate more existential and philosophical ideas. As he later said of the trilogy: "[The detective novel] was useful to me in the same way old musical hall routines and vaudeville were useful to Beckett in writing WAITING FOR GODOT. Or the way romances were useful to Cervantes in writing DON QUIXOTE." A beautiful set of this contemporary classic. Three volumes; 7.5'' x 5''. Original full blue cloth. In original unclipped (no price, as issued) color photographic jackets designed by Katie Messborn (CITY first state without publisher's seal on spine). Blue endpapers. 208, 104, 184 pages. Each volume signed by Auster in ink on title page. Bright, tight, clean and sharp overall.