The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)

First edition thus. Pp. xix, 558. Quarter-bound turquoise cloth over brown boards, lettered in cream-white and gilt to spine; publisher's vignette to upper board. Blue topstain. Jacket design by David Holzman [priced $7.95 to front flap].

Gently bumped to lower board edges, else Fine, in the complete dustwrapper.

Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski. Originally published under the title Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) by Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag in Zürich. First U.S. edition was published by Holt in 1949, from imported sheets of the first English edition printed in London by Francis Aldor (Aldus Publications Ltd), in a translation by Mervyn Savill. That first attempt at translation, hastily released under the title Magister Ludi, "failed to bring out its irony" according to Hesse scholar Theodore Ziolkowski, which the present translation admirably does.

Author's last full-length novel and crowning achievement, The Glass Bead Game was cited by the Swedish Academy in its awarding of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature as "occupying a special position" in Hesse's work.