When Joseph Conrad was discharged from the clipper Torrens in London during the summer of 1893, his seafaring career was over. He had travelled the world by then, risen in rank from apprentice to captain, survived shipwreck and turbulent seas. But after nineteen years afloat he longed for the land, and wrote to his cousin of the 'uniform grey of my existence'. Once ashore, however, vivid memories of his past life began to surface. While steam and internal combustion were changing maritime travel forever, Conrad started to ...
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When Joseph Conrad was discharged from the clipper Torrens in London during the summer of 1893, his seafaring career was over. He had travelled the world by then, risen in rank from apprentice to captain, survived shipwreck and turbulent seas. But after nineteen years afloat he longed for the land, and wrote to his cousin of the 'uniform grey of my existence'. Once ashore, however, vivid memories of his past life began to surface. While steam and internal combustion were changing maritime travel forever, Conrad started to reflect on the voyages he had made in the Golden Age of Sail, the people and ships he had known, the extraordinary communities whose lives, language and very nature were shaped by the swells and silences of the open ocean. The Mirror of the Sea is a personal meditation on the sea and its meanings by one of the twentieth century's most important novelists. Our new edition is illustrated with the seascapes and deck scenes of the artist-sailor John Everett, who Conrad wanted to work with on an illustrated edition of The Mirror and the Sea in the 1920s.' The great thing,' Conrad wrote in 1923, 'is to make the book like art-production - atmospheric - not a shop article.' Nothing came of the project with John Everett at the time; Little Toller has resurrected this lost notion of a collaboration between the writer and the artist.
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Seller's Description:
Good+ Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Harper & Brothers, New York. 1906. Vi, 328 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. Blue-cloth binding with nautical illustration in gold and yellow on the front cover and yellow lettering on front cover and spine. Boards have a light scuff along the spine. Previous owner's name and Chiristmas dedication present to the FFEP. Text is clean and free of marks, binding tight and solid. Joseph Conrad is a largely enigmatic presence in his novels, but in The Mirror of the Sea, written in "tribute to the sea, its ships, and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am" allows the reader to pierce the veil and explore Conrad's biography. Conrad's writes of adventures about smuggling arms to Don Carlos, a claimant to the Spanish throne, and characters like the great-uncle who once had to eat a Lithuanian dog during Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. They also let us see inside the young man who broke with his Polish background and was deeply inspired by the resilience and devotion to duty of his fellow British sailors. Every page is filled with a powerful moral intelligence and sense of history. EB; 8vo 8"-9" tall; 329 pages.
MIRROR OF THE SEA is a first-rate account by Joseph Conrad but this edition, by someone called "First Rate Publishers", is nearly unreadable. The print is microscopic and the chapters are organized poorly. This book looks like very poor quality home publishing put together by an illiterate; if you're in search of this fine account by Conrad, go elsewhere for a copy.