PALAHNIUK, Chuck. Fight Club. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2014.

Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gold-stamped designs and titling to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 208 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special publication page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962) worked as a diesel mechanic and a journalist in Portland, Oregon, before Fight Club was published in 1996. It had been rejected by several publishers. It sold modestly on first publication. Then David Fincher's 1999 film adaptation — starring Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden and Edward Norton as the unnamed narrator, written for the screen by Jim Uhls — failed at the box office, earned mixed critical notices, and became one of the most widely watched and discussed films in the world on DVD and home video. The novel sold in enormous quantities on the back of it and has not stopped since.

There is a particular irony in the existence of this Easton Press edition — a luxury leather-bound collector's object created from a novel whose central argument is that the things you own end up owning you — and it is an irony that Palahniuk, who has a considerable appetite for provocation, would presumably appreciate. The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule is that you do not talk about Fight Club. What follows from these rules is a novel that has been talked about continuously for nearly thirty years.

The narrator is an insomniac corporate drone, unnamed throughout, whose dissatisfaction with his life — the IKEA furniture, the dead-end job, the absence of anything that feels real — leads him first to attend support groups for illnesses he does not have, and then to meet Tyler Durden on a plane. Tyler is everything the narrator is not: charismatic, dangerous, free from the need for anyone's approval. Together they found Fight Club, an underground organisation in which men beat each other senseless in basement car parks by night and go to their offices by day. Fight Club grows into something larger and more dangerous than either of them intended. The narrator begins to suspect that his relationship with Tyler is not what he thought it was.

Fight Club is a novel about masculinity, consumerism, and the appeal of destruction to people who feel trapped in lives they did not choose. It arrived at precisely the moment the culture was ready to hear that argument, and the film's eventual ubiquity — its lines quoted, its aesthetic absorbed into fashion, advertising, and music video — ensured that the novel became one of the defining cultural texts of its decade. Its influence on popular culture has been so extensive that it is now slightly difficult to recover how strange and forceful it was on first reading.

Near fine. Some spotting along edge gilt and some very minor loss to cover gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]

Catalogue Number: HH000528