The Luck of Barry Lyndon

New York: Appleton and Company, 1853. First Edition. Preceding the London book edition by three years. 2 vols., 8vo (173 × 115mm), pp. 267, [1]; 260. Green three-quarter morocco and marbled paper-covered boards, ca. 1900, by James Macdonald, who purchased the Club Bindery from the estate of Robert Hoe. Ruled in gilt, raised bands, gilt-ruled compartments and lettering, blue marbled endpapers with Macdonald's stamp to the verso of the front free endpaper of each volume. Top edge gilt, original red cloth covers bound into the rear of each volume. Rubbing to the extremities, hinges in volume II strengthened, pencil ownership signature of Alice Evans in each volume, a very good set. First serialized in Fraser's Magazine from January to December 1844 under the pseudonym George Savage Fitz-Boodle, the novel is a picaresque autobiography narrated by Redmond Barry, an Irish fortune hunter whose account of his own rise through soldiering, gambling, and an advantageous marriage is so cheerfully self-serving that the reader is left to deduce the squalid truth beneath the boasting; Thackeray's most accomplished use of the unreliable narrator and his first fully realized "novel without a hero," the technique he would perfect four years later in Vanity Fair. It was poorly received in serial form; readers found it harsh and unsympathetic, and Thackeray himself called its composition a nightmare, finishing the final chapters in Malta while his ship sat in quarantine. He revised and retitled it The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. in 1856, but neither version found a wide audience in his lifetime. Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film adaptation reversed that neglect permanently. Shot over 300 days, with scenes lit famously by candlelight using Zeiss lenses made for NASA, and composed in painterly tableaux drawn from Reynolds, Constable, and Hogarth, Barry Lyndon replaced Thackeray's comic first-person narration with an omniscient camera of devastating impersonality. It is now widely regarded as one of the greatest examples of film
as art.