Category: Noise of Time, The

Notes on this edition: Julian Barnes. The Noise of Time. London: London Review Bookshop, 2016. Limited Edition Full Leather.

Julian Barnes’s novel The Noise of Time was published in 2016, concurrently with the London Review Bookshop’s limited edition. The edition featured here is one of three hors de commerce copies signed by the author. Outside of this designation on the limitation page, the hors de commerce edition is identical to the full leather copy limited to 25 copies.

The book itself measures 20.6 x 13.7 cm. The slipcase measures 21.3 x 14.2 cm.

From the limitation page:

A special signed limited First Edition of
The Noise of Time
printed on Longan Book Wove 150gsm paper.
Numbers 1 to 75 have been quarter-bound
in Harmatan Yellow 30 Goatskin
with Atlantic Cloth sides and contain one
facsimile page from the author’s notebook.
25 copies (i to xxv), plus three hors de commerce,
have been fully bound in the same leather
and contain a portfolio of six facsimile pages
of early draft passages and notebook entries.

The edition featured here is numbered “Hors Commerce 2/3” and is signed by Julian Barnes to the limitation page. (Note: The image has been modified to remove the name of the recipient to whom Barnes inscribed the book.)

The facsimile page is contained in a paper folder with the following letterpressed to the front:

1. Notebook entry of possible titles.
2. Middle-of-the-night jotting from bedside notepad.
3. Possible epigraphs, neither of them used.
4. Draft of section when the opening episode returns as a memory in the second part of the novel.
5. Early draft of opening of first part.
6. First notes on novel, from notebook.

JULIAN BARNES (c) 2016