Invisible Man by Ellison, Ralph - 1952

New York: Random House, 1952. Hardcover. Very Good/Fair. Second Printing. Inscribed by Ellison to Frederick Douglass Patterson, the president of the Tuskegee Institute when Ellison was a student there. Very Good in a Fair jacket, unclipped ($3.50), heavy creasing, moderate chips and loss, multiple tears but all still in one piece. Grey and black buckram on the boards, soiled at spots and rubbed at the edges, white ink lettering rubbed at the spine. Square and firmly bound with a black top stain, front hinge a bit over-extended most likely from the inscribing, clean otherwise. A remarkable association copy with a lengthy inscription by Ellison that seems to be his attempt to get out in front of Patterson's potentially reading Bledsoe as a stand-in for himself. In the novel, the president of a Southern all-black university admits that his motivations in leading the university are entirely selfish and expels the narrator from the school, sending him packing with meaningless letters of recommendation. If there was any question if Dr. Patterson served as the inspiration for the nefarious Dr. Bledsoe, Ellison's inscription clears it up: "For Dr. and Mrs. F.D. Patterson/With admiration and hope that the fiction herein in no way flaws their memories of the good things we shared, nor the good things they wished for me, when I was a student at Tuskegee/Sincerely/Ralph Ellison/April 1952