Item #106738 A Fortunate Life. Albert Barnett FACEY.
A Fortunate Life

A Fortunate Life

Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, [May] 1981 [first edition].

Large octavo, [xii] (first leaf and last page blank), 326 pages with a frontispiece portrait, 6 maps and 6 full-page illustrations by Robert Juniper.

Synthetic cloth; short split to the head of the front hinge; personalized commercial bookplate on the half-title; an excellent copy with the dustwrapper lightly sunned on (and very lightly bumped at the head of) the spine.

Signed by Albert Facey on the title page. When he was 86, Facey published 'the autobiography that made him and his life famous. His ordinariness and decency, and the enjoyment he took from a life that by the usual standards was far from fortunate, endeared him to his fellow Australians. The style of the book passed beyond plainness into an elemental purity' (Australian Dictionary of Biography). This casebound first edition is very scarce (we have previously sold a copy with an original order form indicating a print run of only 500). Signed copies are very rare, as Albert Facey died on 11 February 1982, only nine months after the book was published.

Item #106738

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