The Songlines (The Franklin Signed First Edition Society Series)

293, [3] pp. 8vo. Black full leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, ribbon marker bound in. Color reproductions of bark paintings by Aborigines. Franklin Library's Signed First Edition Society released signed, limited editions of new works that preceded the trade editions, with a special foreword and frontispiece that appear only in the limited edition. "The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books."