Lolita Covers

I have multiple copies of only a few books. Usually, I buy the second copy by mistake, for about a dollar, from the bargain bin of a second-hand bookstore. I have consciously purchased more than one copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and this is a big reason why:

This is the first copy of Lolita that I bought, at a Library sale in a very small town, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. The cover was intact when I first got it; the front cover has since detached, and started flaking off towards the centre. In another 10-15 years, it will be down to Nabokov's name and the sunglasses.

The publisher of this edition is Corgi, which I think is a British publishing house. I don't own a single other Corgi book, at any rate. This copy is roughly 40 years old, being a 1969 reprint of a 1961 edition.








This was the second version of Lolita I bought, because I am a sucker. Obviously, it's The Anchor Review, not Lolita per se, although there's about sixty pages of the text plus the Nabokov-writing-as-himself addendum about the book that appears at the end of my Corgi copy of the book. This is supposedly the first version of the book that ever appeared in North America. The Olympia Press 2-volume edition was published in 1955, and this was issued in 1957. Putnam published the first American edition a year later.

I haven't actually read anything in this copy (Auden!) and I dropped a whole eight bucks on it.







And this is my current reading copy of the book. The annotations are especially helpful for glossing sentences written in other languages (mostly French). I am particularly fond of the inclusion of an ad that is described in some detail in the book itself--I assumed it was made up for the puposes of the story, but there it is in the end notes.

It's not a cover to write home about, though. The light's a little to mellow to really show that it apparently consists of illustrations of index cards and note paper. I've yet to see a cover for Lolita that I really like, though, even though Vintage got it very right with some other Nabokov books.