With FIRST STATE POINTS: dark orange title paper, dark orange top edges and 12/73 on back dust cover flap. Extra paste down end-paper at back. Professor Gardner's fifth novel. From the cover, "...is a love story, and also a kind of religious story. In direct progression from its author's previous novels-and this time it is with simple means that he achieves his large effect-it seeks to celebrate what is best in humanness, the gift by which in our best moments we counter cosmic indifference and sisorder, the love all human beings can sometimes feel for all that lives." Cover has two chips at top back edge.

First State, First Issue, First Edition, Fiction, Professor John Gardner