Carroll, Jim

The Basketball Diaries [first edition, signed]

Bolinas: Tombouctou, 1978. First edition. 150 pp. Original perfect-bound printed wrappers. A bit of wear to edges and spine, better than usually seen. Signed by Carroll on the title-page.

Introduction by Tom Clark. In 1973 Carroll had moved from his native New York to the isolation of Bolinas, CA in West Marin County to kick his ongoing heroin habit. It was here in rented houses and cabins that he refined and reconstructed the diary entries of his youth (ages 12-15 as the title-page shows), eventually having it published by his neighbor Michael Wolfe’s Tombouctou Press. Upon Carroll’s death in 2009 Tom Clark wrote, “I could vaguely fathom then that Jim was capable of a poet’s pure wonder, the sort of thing I thought had gone out of poetry with Blake and Keats. Not until much later did I come to fully realize the quality of the poetic genius in whose presence I had been so fortunate to find myself, if only for isolated instants, as I padded along the cold asphalt in my two-dollar sneakers and he sauntered past with his stick and his little dog, giving me a wordless wink and a high sign, beneath the eucalypti, by the waters of the lagoon- all of it now drowned amid the tears of time.”. Item #2594

Price: $1,250.00