KATHY ACKER — Great Expectations, Grove Press, New York, 1983

First Grove Press edition, softcover issue, published by Grove Press / Evergreen, New York, 1983. Cover design by Roy Colmer; cover illustration by Sue Coe. Illustrated softcover; 128 pages; 14 × 21 cm. ISBN 0-394-62480-7.

Condition: good, visibly handled; general rubbing, scratching and creasing to wrappers, edge and corner wear, small areas of abrasion and loss near the foot of the spine. Retail label retained on the rear cover, partly obscuring the printed text. Interior condition not confirmed.

Acker’s text first appeared in 1982 before being issued by Grove Press the following year, making this the first Grove Press edition rather than the absolute first. It was an important stage in the movement of her writing from small experimental presses into wider American circulation.

Beginning with Dickens, Acker breaks the inherited novel into shifting voices, genders, locations and borrowed passages. Literary appropriation is joined to autobiography: the book moves through childhood, abandonment, sexuality and grief while refusing a stable narrator or continuous history. It became one of the works that brought her wider critical attention.

Sue Coe’s illustration gives the Grove edition a particularly strong visual identity. Bodies, animals and architecture are compressed into a black, red and grey field, turning the familiar literary title into something closer to an underground comic, political poster or commercial pulp paperback. The canonical novel returns with its surface and ownership altered.

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