Redheap

London : Faber & Faber, 1930. First edition. Octavo, gilt-lettered red cloth, in the rare illustrated dust jacket by L. Lapthorn (not price-clipped, chips with loss to head and foot of spine, tears with old tape repairs verso ); pp. 318; related newspaper clippings loosely enclosed; a good copy of the true first edition (not the Colonial Edition which was stamped as such).

The first edition of Norman Lindsay’s second published novel. The book was banned in Australia when first published in 1930, making it noteworthy as the first novel by an Australian author to be banned in Australia.

‘Redheap is a 1930 novel by Norman Lindsay. It is a story of life in a country town in Victoria, Australia in the 1890s. Lindsay portrays real characters struggling with the social restrictions of the day. Snobbery and wowserism are dominant themes.’ – Wikipedia.

Lindsay wrote the manuscript in 1918, and – along with his other unpublished novels – he ‘tossed them into a drawer and there let them lie. Brian Penton was the imp who seduced me into publishing a novel. That was Redheap, which he read in MS. He had written a couple of novels himself, and was going off to London in quest of a publisher for them, and he nagged me into letting him take Redheap with him. I let it go with misgivings, prompted, no doubt, by daemonic annoyance over an intrusion of the written word on its form equivalent, and I daresay the virulence of press attack on that novel in this country was inspired by daemonic spite …’ (Norman Lindsay, My Mask, Sydney, 1979, pp. 230-31).

Lindsay wrote his novels ‘as a release from the stress of work’ (ibid., p. 230), and their publication caused something of an identity crisis in Lindsay. ‘Possibly it was just as well that I was not tempted by the lure of easy money to be made out of prose fiction, and that most of my later novels were censored by the Gestapo of the Customs bureaucracy. To function as a writer would have confused the public identification of me as an artist … I have no doubt that the daemonic control of my destiny took dashed good care that my novels were debarred from Australian readers (ibid. p. 229).

Very rare, with no copies in the dust jacket recorded at auction.