First Editions Second Thoughts is a fundraising auction for English Pen curated by noted bookseller Rick Gekoski.
Gekoski invited authors to:
“scribble second thoughts, marginalia or drawings throughout the work in whatever fashion moves you, thus singling out this particular first edition and making it even more desirable for a reader or collector to want to own.”
The result was “some authors annotated on many pages of the text; others wrote sustained comments on the endpapers and blanks; some edited and corrected the text, one marked a book for a performance or a reading; a substantial number offered their own illustrations.”
Many literary heavyweights have contributed including Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Alan Bennett, William Boyd, Margaret Drabble, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Kazuo Ishiguro, Howard Jacobson, Ian McEwan,Hillary Mantel, J.K. Rowling, Lionel Shriver, Ralph Steadman, Tom Stoppard and Jeanette Winterson among others.
Sotheby’s will auction off the 50 contemporary First Editions later this month.
To Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Ralph Steadman adds 14 full page and 4 double page ink drawings across the text and rear end-pages. Also additions to the printed original illustrations, and characteristic ink splatters across other pages. Two new portraits of Hunter S. Thompson.
