Freakshow.

Boston: Little, Brown and Company,, 1954. I haven't read it and don't want to First edition, first printing, presentation copy to Raymond Chandler, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Raymond, Jacquin Sanders", and with Chandler's La Jolla ownership stamp beneath which he as written "From Little Brown & Co - God knows why!". In a letter to the budding writer James Fox in May 1954 Chandler writes, "Your publishers for no reason that I can understand sent me a book called Freak Show by Jacquin Sanders (where the hell does a character get a name like that?). I haven't read it and don't want to." Jacquin "Jack" Sanders (1922-2005) was a rifleman in the U.S. Army infantry, lived in Paris for a couple of years and wrote three novels before he became a full-time journalist at age 40. He was a writer-editor at Newsweek and the New York Daily News, before moving to Florida. A modern reprint describes this, his first book: "Freakshow has occupied a unique niche in underground American literature since 1954. It's a novel which chronicles the somehow-disturbing love affair between Bat Fidler, a troubled, lonely guy and roust-about, and Fish Girl, a beautiful but disfigured sideshow performer, providing amazingly authentic glimpses into both carnival and prison life and defiantly unmasking the freakshow that usually passes for contemporary love." Octavo. Original yellow cloth, spine lettered in red. With dust jacket. Some minor toning to the contents but an excellent copy in the somewhat faded, price-clipped dust jacket.