MOUNT ANALOGUE - René Daumal (1959 English 1st Edition Hardback)

MOUNT ANALOGUE - René Daumal (Vincent Stuart Ltd, 1959)

Very rare 1st edition hardback with dust jacket. 106 pages. Beautifully presented with evocative jacket illustration. 

A beloved cult classic of Surrealism, Pataphysics and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue is the allegorical tale of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. As its numerous editions (most now rare) over the decades attest, the book has been highly influential: Alejandro Jodorowsky's visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation of the book, and John Zorn based an eponymous album on it.

This edition is a 1969 second edition of the the original 1959 English translation by Roger Shattuck - widely considered the best. Left unfinished after Daumal's death of tuberculosis in 1944 - in mid-sentence, as he broke from writing to receive a visitor - Mount Analogue offers a compelling and philosophically resonant chronicle of a group of travelers seeking the titular mountain, based on the symbolic calculations of one Father Sogol ('Logos' spelled backwards) and his students. As Daumal writes, 'Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain - the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope. Translator Roger Shattuck, author of many volumes, is perhaps best known for his important book The Banquet Years, a history of the turn-of-the-century French avant-garde.

Condition: Very Good. Age toning to paper and some light foxing to page block edges and end papers. Dust-jacket complete. Some edge-wear to jacket edges and a few markings to back of jacket. A couple of instances where a single word has been underlined, otherwise unmarked. The jacket is not price clipped.