Shogun

First edition, first impression, published by Atheneum in New York on 23 June 1975 and preceding the UK edition, issued by Hodder & Stoughton on 29 September of the same year. Octavo. Original green quarter cloth over blue boards, spine and front cover lettered in black within a decorative frame, orange map endpapers, top edge yellow. With the original pictorial dust jacket designed by Paul Bacon, priced $12.50 to the front flap. A very good copy indeed: the binding with a small puncture and indentation to the spine, which has the usual concavity due to the weight of the volume, and slight sunning to the top edges of the boards with some discolouration to the bottom edge of the lower board; the contents otherwise clean and fresh internally. The original and unclipped dust jacket very good, with a crease to bottom corners of flaps, a little minor yellowing, as is common, some wear to the spine ends, and a small hole to the upper panel spine hinge with an associated and very inconspicuous tape repair to the verso, together with further neat and inconspicuous tape reinforcement along the top and bottom edges; otherwise a very good example of a jacket that is prone to wear. Clavell's account of an English pilot cast ashore in feudal Japan in 1600 - loosely based on the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate and the adventures of the English navigator William Adams - was the third published and most commercially successful of his Asian Saga novels, though the earliest in the saga's internal chronology. The novel's publication sparked a marked wave of Western interest in Japanese history and culture, and it was adapted for television in 1980 and again in 2024 for FX/Hulu.