A Short History of Lyme Regis

Boston: Little, Brown & Company,1982. First American Edition. Jacket design and book design by Humphrey Stone. Octavo, 52 pp. + 1. Sky blue cloth boards with gilt spine imprinting. Fine, flawless book in Fine, unclipped jacket with just a trace of price-sticker adhesive on the front flap. Very handsome; see scan. First American edition, after The Dovecote Press first English edition of 1982. This is the expanded form of the Fowles-produced-and-authored "A Brief History of Lyme", a 12-page pamphlet issued by the Friends of the [Lyme Regis] Museum a year earlier, in 1981. Both are more than just historically informative; they have the feel more of a story, that of a tenacious little seaside town which found fame the natural way, still struggles to survive, and manages to do so now by virtue of an ambivalent relationship with the tourists, developers and vacation-homeowners who are now the local economic lifeblood - where once fisherman and salt-boilers held to that responsibility. L-39n