Young Adam
Alexander Trocchi
First UK edition. 20.5 x 14 cm, original maroon cloth, dust jacket. London, Heinemann. 1961
An excellent copy, dust jacket rubbed at extremities with some wear to head of spine.
Alexander Trocchi was the most charismatic of the bright crowd around Merlin, the avant-garde literary magazine he edited. The publisher Maurice Girodias, who ran the Olympia Press, described him as "the big bad literary wolf of his time" and the first of Olympia's "all-out literary stallions". In the early 1950s, Girodias convinced Trocchi to write anonymous DBs ("dirty books") for Olympia. Trocchi took the pseudonym 'Frances Lengel' and set to work. One of these efforts was Young Adam, published by Olympia in 1954. It was the first of Trocchi's novels to appear in the UK, this time under his real name, and was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003.
This copy of the UK first edition has the bookshop stamp of Le Mistral, which would become the present-day Shakespeare and Company. Trocchi was a bookshop regular in the early days and even had a library card that we still have in the archives!
