KILLER IN THE RAIN - UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY
Boston & Barnstable, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company / Crane Duplicating Service, Inc., 1964. First Edition. Volume gathering eight of Chandler's stories which first appeared in the pages of Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Story Magazine, collected here for the first time. Uncommon in the proof state; while no hard numbers are known for how many such proofs were printed, marketing materials for Crane from this period suggest they would not undertake a job printing fewer than 11 copies of a proof, with other known examples from this period numbering between two to three dozen. Bruccoli A14.2. 7341. Item #7393
First Printing. Octavo (20cm); publisher's galley sheets, comb-bound into light blue printed card covers, with a mimeographed publicity letter folded and stapled onto inner front cover; xiv,394,[2]pp. A spirit-duplicated snipe is mounted to the verso of the front cover, with the tentative date typed (8/5/64?) and the proposed price written in red ink ($4.50). Wrappers show modest edge wear, some toning and hand-soil, with a few faint stains to rear cover; contents clean, with the comb-binding intact; Very Good+.
Price: $1,000.00