KATHY ACKER — Young Lust, Pandora Press, London, 1989

First Pandora edition, UK paperback original, published by Pandora Press / Unwin Paperbacks, London, 1989. Cover photograph by Michel Delsol, 1988; cover design by The Pierpoint Design Company. Illustrated softcover; 306 pages; 13 × 19.5 cm. ISBN 0-04-440349-6.

Contains: Kathy Goes to Haiti; The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec; Florida.

Condition: good, visibly handled; rubbing and surface scratching to wrappers, creasing along the spine and lower front corner, edge wear and softened corners. Binding appears intact; interior condition not confirmed.

Young Lust gathers three of Acker’s formative underground novels into a single commercial paperback. Travel writing, artist biography and film noir are dismantled and reused through sexuality, repetition and unstable identity. Previously dispersed texts return as a consolidated body of work.

Shortly after publication, four pages incorporated into The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec were identified as originating in Harold Robbins’s 1974 novel The Pirate. Robbins’s British publisher demanded that the edition be withdrawn and pulped. William S. Burroughs later approached Robbins, and retroactive permission was secured.

The dispute entered the material history of the book. A method already operating inside the writing passed into copyright, negotiation and distribution. Appropriation ceased to be only a literary procedure and became an administrative event surrounding the paperback itself.

Michel Delsol’s cover has become one of the edition’s defining elements. Acker appears from behind, her tattooed body replacing the conventional author portrait. The body functions as image, signature and publishing surface.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.