Grimus

First edition, first impression: London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1975. Signed and inscribed by the author on the title page: "To Dr Philip Murray / with my best wishes / Salman Rushdie / 19th June 1985". Octavo. Original purple cloth, the spine lettered in gilt. With the original pictorial dust jacket in dark blue and purple, unclipped and priced £3.50 net to the front flap, the flaps carrying commendations from Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin and a photograph of the author by Fay Godwin. Very good: a hint of pushing to the spine ends; a touch of toning to the edges, with some spotting, mainly to the fore-edge. The contents clean and free from any inscriptions. The dust jacket near fine and unfaded, with a little wear to the spine head. Rushdie's first book, written for the science fiction novel competition then being run by Gollancz, who published it in 1975 but declined to market it under the genre label. The novel takes its structure from Farid ud-Din Attar's twelfth-century Sufi poem Mantiq al-Tayr, The Conference of the Birds, in which the birds journey in search of the Simurgh; the title is an anagram of Simurg, and the back flap accordingly places the book among the "secret books" of the Sufis. It attracted little notice on publication. Rushdie's breakthrough novel came six years later with Midnight's Children, which took the Booker Prize in 1981 and was afterwards voted the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008. The inscription is dated June 1985, between Shame and The Satanic Verses.