Sleepers Awake (INSCRIBED)

PATCHEN, Kenneth.

Sleepers Awake.

FIRST EDITION, TRADE ISSUE — INSCRIBED BY PATCHEN, JUNE 1946. New York: Padell Book Company, 1946.

Inscribed by Patchen on the front free endpaper: "for Margaret / with all the good wishes of / Kenneth Patchen / June 18, 1946." Octavo. 389 pp. Original gray cloth, gilt-lettered spine, top edge stained black; in the original Patchen-designed pictorial dust jacket, unclipped at $3.50. Morgan A11. Near fine in a very good dust jacket; the binding firm and clean, with no chipping or wear to the jacket spine.

One of Patchen's major prose books and among the boldest of his anti-novels. Across its pages he folds narrative into dream-vision, satire into surrealism, and verse into statements of principle, working the visual arrangement of words on the page two decades before concrete poetry became an international movement. Inscribed first editions in the original Patchen-designed jacket are increasingly uncommon in the trade.

SKU TO-2026-011