HARDING, Paul. Tinkers. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2013.

Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 191 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009.

Paul Harding (b. 1967) grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts, and played drums in the indie rock band Cold Water Flat for much of his twenties before turning to fiction. He wrote Tinkers over a number of years and submitted it to every major publisher in New York, receiving uniform rejections. He was on the point of putting the manuscript away when Bellevue Literary Press — an independent imprint affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, founded to publish work at the intersection of literature and medicine — accepted it. The first print run was modest. Before the book was even published, it developed a devoted following among independent booksellers. Readers and critics fell in love with it, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel's remarkable success "the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory." It was the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award in 1981. AbeBooks

George Washington Crosby is dying at home, surrounded by his family, hallucinating as his brain chemistry alters in the approach of death. Tinkers takes place in the space of those hallucinations — a temporal and psychological space in which George's own memories blur into the memories of his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, an epileptic tinker who travelled the back roads of rural Maine in the early twentieth century selling household goods from a mule-drawn cart. Howard's epilepsy was a source of shame and terror in his community; his consciousness, during seizures, opened onto visions that the novel renders with great delicacy. He eventually abandoned his wife and children rather than be committed to an institution. George grew up without him and spent his working life repairing clocks — attending to the mechanisms by which time is measured and made legible.

The novel is 191 pages long and reads like a meditation rather than a narrative: a sustained inquiry into the relationship between consciousness and time, fathers and sons, the visible surface of a life and the invisible interior that shaped it. Harding's prose — dense, lyrical, attentive to the physical world in the manner of the great American naturalist writers — makes demands of its reader and rewards them accordingly. His second novel, This Other Eden (2023), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, confirming the achievement of Tinkers as the beginning of a significant career.

Near fine. A few spots to upper edge gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000515